Science: Nobelmen of 1958

  • Share
  • Read Later

(2 of 3)

Half of the $41,420 prize will go to the team of George Wells Beadle of Caltech (TIME, July 14), who is this year's George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University, and Edward L. Tatum of Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute. Working together at Stanford University in 1940, they discarded the fruit flies traditionally used in studying heredity, employed instead a selected red bread mold, Neurospora crassa. The mold is easier to handle, its life chemistry is simpler, and yet it reproduces sexually.

Beadle and Tatum irradiated masses of mold with X rays and searched for mutations in the spores. On the 299th try they got a mold that would not grow unless it was fed vitamin B-6 (pyridoxine). The normal mold makes vitamin B-6 for itself. They traced this deficiency to an X-ray-damaged gene that failed to produce the necessary enzyme (organic catalyst) for producing B6. This provided a means of studying genetic changes by corresponding changes in the organism's ability or failure to produce specific chemicals—thus giving genetics a new exactness and turning it into a predominantly chemical science.

Sex & Transduction. The other half of the medicine prize was awarded to Professor Joshua Lederberg (33) of the University of Wisconsin, whom his colleagues unstintingly rate as a genius. When 22 and working under Tatum as a graduate student at Yale, Lederberg proved that bacteria have a sex life of a sort, i.e., reproduce by the union of two organisms, with a consequent exchange of genes. This discovery widely expanded the field of experiment, since bacteria are even handier than molds in genetic experiments.

Even more important was Lederberg's later discovery that viruses preying on bacteria can change the heredity of their victims. In this process, which is called transduction, a virus invades a bacterium, breaks it up and reorganizes its material into hundreds of new virus particles. If these particles in turn infect another bacterium and it survives, they sometimes change it into a new strain. Apparently the viruses, acting somewhat like submicroscopic spermatozoa, take hereditary material from the first bacterium and transfer it to the second.

Genetics does not seem at first glance to have much to do with medicine, but many human disabilities are based in genetics. The most baffling problem of medicine, cancer, is caused by a genetic change in human cells that makes them multiply irresponsibly. Increased knowledge of genetics may eventually cure or prevent cancer.

Secret of Insulin. Led by a man thumping a small drum, a joyful group gathered in a Cambridge University lab to celebrate with champagne when word came that this year's chemistry prize had gone to British Chemist Frederick Sanger. A fellow at King's College, Sanger is attacking the mystery of life from another chemical angle. In 1954 Sanger announced that after ten years of work, he and a small group of colleagues had determined the structure of the insulin molecule. Their achievement did not result in cheaper or better insulin for the world's diabetics, but it may ultimately prove more important. For insulin is a protein, and the active parts of all living organisms are made largely of proteins.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3