Ordinary Geniuses by Gino Segre

Author:Gino Segre
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Max had realized this nearly a decade earlier when he had gone to the basement laboratory at Caltech and seen Ellis’s experiments with phages. The analyses with them were quick and simple, unlike the much more laborious ones that fruit flies required. Max had been well ahead of his time, but the decision he had made then was now gathering widespread acceptance. Watson, often described at that time as a young man in a hurry, felt that the immediate future of genetics lay in the directions Max and Luria were pursuing, not in those Muller was interested in.

The sessions of the 1946 George Washington University conference reflected this awareness. Drosophila had become a relative backwater in genetics; the excitement had moved to bacteria and viruses, shown only months earlier to possess genes. They were now at the center of the growing interest in molecular biology, and all the conferees were eager to hear the latest news about them. In line with this thinking, the first morning session was identified as “The Problem of the Gene—introduced by Dr. G. W. Beadle” and the first afternoon session as “Bacteriophage—introduced by Dr. Max Delbrück.”

Beadle, most famous for the work with Tatum summarized by the “one gene, one enzyme” epithet, focused on the biochemical aspects of genetics. Delbrück’s interests lay elsewhere. It was of course extremely important to know the action of genes, but he felt that such knowledge did not bring the scientist any closer to understanding how a gene is structured or how it encodes the necessary information for its workings. These were the kinds of questions Max hoped to answer by studying bacteriophages. In a 1978 Caltech interview, Max was asked about what many saw as his lack of appreciation for or, more strongly, his seeming “hostility towards chemistry in the investigation of biological systems.” He replied:. . . If you say “One gene, one enzyme” then the question remained, how does the gene make the enzyme, and how does the gene make the gene, and this was in fact not answered at all by any of the biochemical approaches. So in a sense I think my reservations about the powers of biochemistry were appropriate, and if in addition I was glib and arrogant about it, then that was just a personality defect. I mean it was, of course, true that I had never learned any chemistry or biochemistry, and just did not want to take the time to do so.

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