The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson

Author:Horace Freeland Judson [Judson, Horace Freeland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621820437
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Published: 2013-06-25T07:00:00+00:00

Hogness once described that work to me. “It was part of the dogma of how things got regulated and how things got adjusted, at the time, that there was a lot of protein turnover, breaking down to amino acids. The data was for mammalian cells. But there was a lot of confusion in that data. So when we showed that there was no protein turnover in exponentially growing [that is, doubling at full rate] bacterial cells—it later turned out that there is some turnover when they go into lag phase, that is, when they’ve achieved full growth—it caused, among the more classical biochemists, disbelief. But the result was very clear.”

“Our conclusion was against the whole Zeitgeist of the time,” Monod said. “And I remember it was early in 1954, I lectured in the States, giving seminars in various places, including in Berkeley—this is where I met Gamow—on the subject that the interpretation of the so-called ‘dynamic state’ of the proteins was wrong. That proteins inside a cell can be perfectly stable. Which we had demonstrated with Mel. You’ve got to realize that it raised an absolute furor! There was this Hegelian idea, you know, that this dynamic state was a sort of secret of life…. At that time, the only people who were fully aware that this business of the dynamic state of protein molecules couldn’t be right, were the crystallographers. Because it couldn’t be right if they got good crystals. To which, of course, the cell physiologists or biochemists said, ‘But you are looking at dead molecules!’ You see? Let me try to find a quotation that I know I have in one of my old papers.”

He went to a bookshelf, took down one from a set of leather-bound volumes. The floor squeaked. He leafed through the pages to the paper he had written with Hogness and Cohn. “I remember this sentence raised a furor with many of my colleagues.” He skimmed for a moment, then began to read. “‘This suggests’—this is the interpretation of our results—‘very strongly indeed that turnover rates measured under these conditions’—that is, the Schoenheimer type of conditions—‘express the dynamic state of the tissue, rather than the state of the protein molecules within the cells. In any case, there is, to our knowledge, no experimental evidence that the proteins within the cells of mammals are any more dynamic than those of Escherichia coli’—which we had just demonstrated were not dynamic, but stable molecules. And, mind you”—he put the book away—“if it were not true that macromolecules, proteins, are stable, molecular biology would not be what it is.”

Matthew Meselson heard Monod’s lecture at Caltech that spring, and began to wonder whether it would be possible to distinguish newly synthesized enzyme molecules from older ones in the ultracentrifuge by labelling one stage of growth with heavy hydrogen in the broth.

Had Gamow mentioned coding? “Yes,” Monod said. “I do remember seeing Gamow, in California, very soon after he had written this paper [about the code] and he was telling me about it.

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