Trilobites

Avery’s purification of transforming principle and Kornberg’s purification of the first DNA polymerase, the experiments I have described were of a new type where what might be called the chemical behaviour of genetic material was being analysed without the benefit of purification. And this has become the new style in biology, inaugurated in the late 1950s by Taylor, Meselson and Stahl. It was, however, rather too unorthodox for some biochemists. For example, a few years later Sydney Brenner’s group in Cambridge, using unpurified extracts of phage-infected E. coli, demonstrated that a genetic map (based on linkage data for mutations within a gene) was co-linear with the amino-acid sequence of the protein encoded by that gene, and this experiment so incensed a very famous biochemist that he said he would fire anyone in his laboratory that ever referred to it again! In the 50 years since then, molecular biology has continued to pour forth a stream of delightful discoveries, each adding new actors to the drama — the manner of regulation of gene expression in bacteria (largely a French contribution), the melting and reannealing of nucleic acids, the code, mRNA, chaperones, prions, siRNA, the antiquity and catalytic power of rRNA, and so on — a landscape teeming with excitement. These have been happy years. As Wordsworth wrote about a very different revolution “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven”. Will biology ever see another revolution like this? As things stand, it seems unlikely. It took Avery about 10 years to complete the purification of transforming principle. Neither he, nor Hershey, Taylor, Meselson or Stahl had to bother themselves with the endless writing of grants. With the present forms of support for science, I suspect that not one of them could have persuaded an NIH Study Section to fund their own particular adventure into the unknown.