Maclyn McCarty

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Maclyn McCarty with Francis Crick and James Watson

Maclyn McCarty (born June 9, 1911 in South Bend , Indiana , † January 2, 2005 in New York City ) was an American biologist.

He studied biochemistry at Stanford University (graduating in 1933) and medicine at Johns Hopkins University , where he graduated with an MD in 1937 and then completed a three-year specialist training in pediatrics . In 1941 he went to Oswald Avery at Rockefeller University (then Rockefeller Institute and Hospital) in New York State , where he stayed for almost 60 years.

With Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod , he showed in 1944 that the genetic transformation in pneumococci is effected by DNA and not by proteins . This was an important step towards the realization that DNA and not, as was previously assumed, proteins are the carriers of genetic information. This realization did not take off immediately and was not widely accepted until the breakthrough of James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, influenced by the work of Avery, McLeod and McCarty. However, they did not explicitly quote them, which McCarty was not very pleased with and said in a Nature article on the 50th anniversary of the work of Watson and Crick. Avery, McLeod and McCarty had been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but none of them won it.

The reason for these studies were research on pneumococci (the gene that coded for components of the bacterial wall and brought about the transition from the non-virulent R-form to the virulent S-form with a smooth bacterial wall), and infectious diseases were his main field of work. From 1946 he headed the laboratory for bacteriology and immunology of Homer Swift , who was retiring from Rockefeller University, on streptococci and their causation of rheumatic fever, which McCarty researched intensively in the following decades. There Rebecca Lancefield also found her Lancefield classification of streptococci. McCarty and co-workers examined the exact structure of the bacterial wall and discovered that the bacterium produced enzymes that broken down the DNA ( deoxyribonucleases ).

McCarty was later Vice President of Rockefeller University and chief physician of Rockefeller University Hospital (Physician in Chief). He was also the director of the New York City Public Health Research Institute.

In 1963 McCarty was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1966 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 1981 to the American Philosophical Society . In 1981 he received the Robert Koch Medal , in 1988 the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal , in 1989 the George M. Kober Medal and in 1994 he was awarded the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science .

He was the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine for over forty years .

He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. MacLeod's place in the laboratory had become vacant as he became chairman of the microbiology department at New York University . McCarty was officially from 1942 to 1946 as an officer (Lieutenant-Commander) in the Medical Corps of the US Navy, but posted to Rockefeller University.
  2. Avery, McLeod, McCarty Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types , parts 1 to 3, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Volume 79, 1944, pp. 137–158, Volume 83, 1946, p. 89, P. 97
  3. ^ Maclyn McCarty: Discovering genes are made of DNA. In: Nature. 421, 2003, p. 406, doi : 10.1038 / nature01398 .
  4. For the wall shape, R for rough