Conversations in genetics. Vol. 1, No. 5: Talking with Evelyn Witkin.

Recorded on September 4, 2003, at the Doral Forrestal Conference Center,Princeton, JJ., Professor Carol Gross, University of California at San Francisco interviews Evelyn Witkin, Barbara McClintock Professor Emerita, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Witkin was a founder of the field of DNA repair. Her pioneering experiments in E. Coli led her to distinguish between error-free and error-prone repair mechanisms, show how these affect mutagenesis and define the complexity of the cellular response to DNA damage. Concluding that mutagenesis requires replication past unrepaired lesions, she predicted the existence of a new class of DNA polymerases, now known to be universal and to underlie both repair and somatic cell hypermutation. Her studies revealed that ultraviolet damage initiates a coordinately regulated response, now called the 'SOS response', which enhances repair, effects UV mutagenesis and halts cell division until damage is repaired. Evelyn Witkin received the 2002 National Medal of Science for her work.