Joshua Lederberg loved to say how in the late 1940s and early 1950s, everybody (but him) thought that bacteria were asexual plants.
He soon straightened them and the bacteria out : he demonstrated that (once in about a billion go-a-rounds in a few strains of) bacteria have normal man-on-top sex just like animals and humans.
He found that a few members of a few different strains of the same bacterial species sometimes exchanged genetic material by a sort of physical bridge between them : HGT (horizontal gene transfer) by conjugation.
Headlines screamed out their relief : "bacteria ain't queer - they're normal !"
Later another scientist, Norton Zinder, discovered that a few viruses occasionally and accidentally injected bacteria genetic material from an earlier bacteria host into a new different bacteria host : HGT by transduction.
Sex by injection ! screamed the headlines not .
Either Zinder, a grad student working under Lederberg, was nowhere as brash and as enterprising as his boss - or maybe he knew better than to try and steal some of his boss's glory.
Not that that ever stopped Lederberg.
The original (and most common) form of HGT out there in the natural world was HGT by bacterial transformation - discovered and publicized in the science literature 25 years before Lederberg's supposedly ground-breaking discovery.
This method was made known by a number of papers from Martin Henry Dawson but he never tried to win headlines by laying it on too thick.
Basically in this method, 'sex' between different types of bacteria happens when one bacteria eats a piece of DNA from a dead and decaying bacteria from another strain or species.
"Bacteria are perverts - have sex with dead ! " would have made a great headline in 1928, but is not something you'd see often even today with our more liberated journalism.
Lederberg knew exactly what 1950s Cold War America wanted to see - in its teens and in its bacteria - good old fashioned normal values.
No deviants wanted - in bacteria or in housewives.
You could almost smell the Nobel Peace Prize coming for Lederberg- but for some reason the one he got - in 1958 - was for Medicine.
Very queer that ....
No comments:
Post a Comment