"More about the chemistry of heredity"

Date:
[1956]
Reference:
PP/CRI/H/2/8
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: "More about the chemistry of heredity". Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1/8
    In the issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, dated the 20th of February of this year, there appeared a very important scientific paper. It is not really even a paper, but /&? •> a letter to the Editor, oatìf^ac&sst a thousand words long, written by Dr, Fraenkel-Conrat, who works in the Virus Laboratory in Berkeley, California. I doubt if many people, casually turning over the pa^es of the Journal - more than six thousand pages of it come out every year - have realised the significance of this short little note, but those of us who are interested in the chemistry of heredity have read it with enormous interest. It describes,very briefly, a series of experiments on a virus, known as Tobacco Mosaic Virus, which attacks ssHxiaiiaxjiiaH&s Tobacco plants. There are available different strains of thxis virus - that is, viruses, which though closely related are measurably different. ïhat Dr. Fraenkel-Conrat did was to break up each of these viruses,very gently, into two parts. He then took the first part of one strain of the virus and combined it with the second part of another strain. Roughly speaking he made a new virus, having the inside of one ty^pe and the outside of another. He xh infected plants with this composite virus, and then examined the verv larere amounts of new virus which the infecter! plants ty re produced. Now the interesting question was - which < of t-kufew viruseg would the new virus resemble ? Would it be mixed, like the infecting virus ? or would il perhaps be like the virus which