The “molecular war” cost Harvard a Nobel Prize

I subscribed the Scientific American with an All Access option (12-issue of print and digital access and the access of all archive since 1845—the treasury I am going after).

I’m reading Howard Temin’s “RNA-directed DNA synthesis” in the issue of January 1972.  Students of genetics would know this is a big deal then; it is against the law of so-called “central dogma” (DNA → RNA → protein; this concept was conceived by Francis Crick, but he never published it; it was mentioned in a letter to the RNA Tie Club). Temin shared the Nobel Prize in 1975 with David Baltimore, who discovered the reverse transcriptase and Renato Dulbecco, under whom Temin was a post-graduate student. I was disappointed that the Wall Street Journal didn’t even have a Remembrance (obituary) for Dulbecco when he died in 2012.

Scientific American asked Temin to write this article three years before he was honored by the Nobel Prize.  Joy, I believe you had a textbook authored by Temin; either in undergraduate or medical school, I forgot.

Many years ago I wrote an article about the “Molecular War” fought between E.O. Wilson and James Watson at Harvard, detail of which is not the topic of this writing, but I can show you what Matthew Meselson said in 2002,

 “Yes, at Harvard there was a war between classical biologists and molecular biologists, but it wasn’t a war over science. There was never any discussions of science between—there was a war over space and money! Like any other war! And personalities, maybe, entered in somewhat. But it was mainly a war fought at faculty meetings.”

This molecular war cost Harvard a Nobel Prize in 1975. Prior to that Harvard was trying to recruit Temin from University Of Wisconsin, Temin accepted with a condition of giving his wife (a population geneticist) a faculty position.  Considering hiring a population geneticist was “out of mind”, James Watson vehemently objected; All Watson wanted was molecular biologist, nothing else.  And the result is University of Wisconsin got a Nobel Prize in 1975, not Harvard.

Joy, have you remembered that Matthew Meselson was the keynote speaker on your undergraduate graduation? He and Franklin Stahl demonstrated the DNA replication back in 1958 basically proving the DNA structure Watson & Crick hypothesized was correct. Meselson witnessed the molecular war first hand.