Howard M. Temin

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Howard Martin Temin (born December 10, 1934 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † February 9, 1994 in Madison , Wisconsin ) was an American biologist . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975 for his findings in the field of cancer research together with David Baltimore and Renato Dulbecco .

Life

Temin grew up in Philadelphia and attended high school biology classes at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor , Maine. He studied biology at Swarthmore College and after graduating in 1955 from the California Institute of Technology ("CalTech") in Pasadena , California . He turned first experimental embryology , the experimental virology to and worked from 1957 in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco , where he in 1959 his doctoral thesis on the Rous sarcoma virus ( Rous sarcoma virus anfertigte, RSV). The RSV became a model system for him, with which he also worked in the following years. According to his own admission, he was also strongly influenced by the collaboration with Harry Rubin and the contact with Max Delbrück . In 1960 he became an Assistant Professor at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison . He later became a professor there and also in 1974 American Cancer Society Professor of Viral Oncology and Cell Biology. He died of lung cancer even though he never smoked.

plant

From 1964 he propagated publicly his "provirus hypothesis" that says is that certain viruses with RNA - genome ( retroviruses (. Eg integrate) into the human genome and there by external influences radiation , carcinogens or other) are activated and so can lead to cancer. The prerequisite for this was the transcription of the viral RNA genome in DNA . This hypothesis violates the widespread notion that the flow of information only ever runs in the direction of DNA → RNA → protein (see central dogma of molecular biology ). He has been working on the experimental underpinning of his thesis since 1960 (published in 1964). This made him a scientific outsider for a while, whose thesis was generally vehemently rejected and laughed at. On the other hand, he was respected for having developed a method to demonstrate the ability of RNA viruses to cause cancer in cell cultures, which revolutionized the field.

Around 1970, Temin and David Baltimore discovered the enzyme that can bring about this transcription process from RNA to DNA: reverse transcriptase . It plays an important role in genetic engineering and in HIV (a retrovirus).

Honors and memberships

He has received numerous awards for his achievements, in addition to the Nobel Prize, the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology (1972), the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (1973) and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and a Gairdner Foundation International Award ( both 1974). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973), the National Academy of Sciences (1974), the American Philosophical Society (1978) and the Royal Society (1988).

He was Associate Editor of the Journal of Virology, Journal of Cellular Physiology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a lakefront path is named after him, which he used every day to get to and from work (on foot or by bike).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Shane Crotty, Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science, University of California Press 2001, p. 77