German archaeologist and scholar who taught himself thirteen languages. He was a highly successful businessman, and used his accumulated wealth to finance an expedition to find ancient Troy. He managed to locate the city, but his unsystematic excavation methods unfortunately destroyed and jumbled the remains of the ancient city. Nevertheless, the developments arising from his work led to the creation of modern techniques of scientific archaeology.

Heinrich Schliemann (Born: January 6, 1822 in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin; Death: December 26, 1890, Naples) was a German archaeologist, an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer, and an important excavator of Troy and of the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns, lending material weight to Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Aeneid as reflecting historical events.

Childhood, youth, and life as a businessman

Schliemann was born in Neubukow in 1822. His father was a poor Protestant minister named Ernst Schliemann. Heinrich’s mother, Luise Therese Sophie, died in 1831, when he was just 9. After her death, Heinrich was sent to live with his uncle. He was enrolled in the Gymnasium (grammar school) at Neustrelitz at age 11 with his attendance paid for by his father. He attended the grammar school for at least a year. He would later show interest in history. This had been encouraged by his father, who had schooled him in the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey and had given him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer’s Illustrated History of the World for Christmas in 1829. Schliemann later claimed that at the age of 8 he had declared he would one day excavate the city of Troy. Schliemann’s interest in the classics continued throughout his time at the Gymnasium, so it is likely that he would have been further exposed to Homer. However, he was transferred to the vocational school, or Realschule, after his father was accused of embezzling church funds, and had to quit the vocational school in 1836 when his father was no longer able to pay for it. According to his diary, his interest in ancient Greece was conceived when he overheard a university student reciting the Odyssey of Homer in classical Greek; Heinrich was taken by the language’s beauty. Unfortunately, his family’s poverty left Schliemann unable to afford a university education, and as such it was Schliemann’s early academic experiences that established the fundamental character of his later life. He was a highly original person with unconventional thinking and methods which appeared to have given him a lot of admirers as well as enemies. He wanted to return to the educated life, to reacquire all the things of which he was deprived in childhood. Yet in his archaeological career, there was often a division between him and the educated professionals.

After leaving Realschule at age 14, Heinrich became a grocer’s apprentice at Herr Holtz’s grocery in Fürstenberg. He labored in the grocery for five years, reading voraciously whenever he had a spare moment. In 1841, Schliemann moved to Hamburg and became a cabin boy on the Dorothea, a steamer bound for Venezuela. After twelve days at sea the ship foundered in a gale, and the survivors washed up on the shores of the Netherlands. Schliemann became a messenger, office attendant and then book-keeper in Amsterdam. On March 1, 1844, he took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import/export firm. There he displayed such judgement and talent for the work that they sent him as a General Agent in 1846 to St. Petersburg, where the markets were favorable. He represented a number of companies. He prospered there and continued to nourish a passion for the Homeric story and an ambition to become a great linguist. He did learn Russian and Greek, employing a system that he used his entire life to learn languages — Schliemann spoke 13 languages, including his mother tongue and wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he happened to be in.

Schliemann had an emourmous gift for languages, and by the end of his life he was conversant in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish as well as his native German. Schliemann’s ability with languages was an important part of his career as a businessman in the importing trade. In 1850 Heinrich learned of the death of his brother, Ludwig, who had become wealthy as a speculator in the California gold fields. Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento. The bank bought and resold over a million dollars in gold dust in just six months. The prospectors could mine or pan for the gold, but they had no way to sell it except to middlemen such as Schliemann, who made quick fortunes on it. Schliemann amassed a large fortune speculating on various stock markets prior to the Californian gold rush, adding to his already considerable fortune.

While he was there California was made a state, giving him and other current residents United States citizenship.

According to his memoirs, before arriving in California he had dined in Washington with President Millard Filmore and his family. He also published an account of the San Francisco fire of 1851.

He was not in the United States long. On April 7, 1852, he sold his business rather suddenly (allegedly due to fever) and returned to Russia. There he attempted to live the life of a gentleman, which brought him into contact with Ekaterina Lyschin, the niece of one of his wealthy friends. Previously he had learned that his childhood sweetheart, Minna, had married.

Heinrich and Ekaterina were married on October 12, 1852. The marriage was troubled from the start. Ekaterina wanted him to be richer than he was and withheld conjugal rights until he made a move in that direction, which he did. Schliemann cornered the market in indigo and then went into the indigo business, turning a good profit. Ekaterina and Heinrich had a son, Sergey. Two other children followed.

Having a family to support moved Schliemann to attend to business even though he still had his first fortune. He found a way to make yet another quick fortune as a military contractor in the Crimean War, 1854-1856. He cornered the market in saltpeter, sulfur, and lead, constituents of ammunition, which he resold to the Russian government.

By 1858, Schliemann was wealthy enough to retire. Some say he retired at 36, which would have been in 1858; others say 1863, at age 41. In his memoirs he claimed that he wished to dedicate himself to the pursuit of Troy.

Life as an archaeologist

It is not certain by what path Schliemann really arrived at either archaeology or Troy. His wealth enabled Schliemann to become a thrill seeker. He traveled a great deal, seeking out ways to get to famous cultural and historical icons. One of his most famous exploits was disguising himself as a Bedouin tribesman to gain access to forbidden areas of Mecca, the holy Muslim city.

His first interest of a classical nature seems to have been the location of Troy. The city’s very existence was then in dispute. Perhaps his attention was attracted by the first excavations at Santorini in 1862 by Ferdinand Fouqué. This possibility argues for an early retirement date, as he was already an international traveller by then. He may have been inspired by Frank Calvert, whom he met on his first visit to the Hissarlik site in 1868.

Somewhere in his many travels and adventures he lost Ekaterina. She was not interested in adventure and had remained in Russia. Schliemann claimed to have utilised the divorce laws of Indiana in 1850, using that state’s lax divorce laws to divest himself of his Russian wife Ekaterina in absentia.

Based on the work of a British archaeologist, Frank Calvert, who had been excavating the site in Turkey for over 20 years, Schliemann decided that Hissarlik was the site of Troy. In 1868 — a busy year for Schliemann — he visited sites in the Greek world, published Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he advocated for Hissarlik as the site of Troy, and submitted a dissertation in ancient Greek proposing the same thesis to the University of Rostock. He received a PhD in 1869 from the university of Rostock for that submission. Regardless of his previous interests and adventures, Schliemann’s course was set. He would take over Calvert’s excavations on the eastern half of the Hissarlik site, which was on Calvert’s property. The Turkish government owned the western half. Calvert became Schliemann’s collaborator and partner.

Schliemann brought dedication, enthusiasm, conviction and a not inconsiderable fortune to the work. Excavations cannot be made without funds, and are vain without publication of the results. Schliemann was able to provide both. Consequently, he made his name in the field of Mycenaean archaeology and, despite later criticism, his work continues to receive great attention and favor from some Classical archaeologists to this day.

Schliemann knew he would need an “insider” collaborator versed in Greek culture of the times. As he had divorced Ekaterina in 1868, he was able to advertise for a wife: which he did, in a newspaper in Athens. A friend, the Archbishop of Athens, suggested a relative of his, the seventeen-year-old Sophia Engastromenos. Schliemann soon married her, in October of 1869. They later had two children, Andromache and Agamemnon Schliemann; he reluctantly allowed them to be baptized, but only solemnized the ceremony by placing a copy of the Iliad on the children’s heads and reciting hundred hexameters.

By 1871, Schliemann was ready to go to work at Troy.

His career began before archaeology developed as a professional field, and so, by present standards, the field technique of Schliemann’s work leaves a lot to be desired. Thinking that Homeric Troy must be in the lowest level, he dug hastily through the upper levels, reaching fortifications that he took to be his target. In 1872 he and Calvert fell out over this method. Schliemann flew into a fury when Calvert published an article stating that the Trojan War period was missing from the record.

As if to confirm Schliemann’s views, a cache of gold appeared in 1873; Schliemann named it “Priam’s Treasure.” He later wrote that he had seen the gold glinting in the dirt and dismissed the workmen so that he and Sophie could excavate it themselves and remove it in her shawl. Schliemann was successful in creating public interest in antiquity. Sophie later wore “the Jewels of Helen” for the public. Schliemann published his findings in 1874, in Trojanische Altertümer (”Trojan Antiquities”).

This publicity backfired when the Turkish government revoked Schliemann’s permission to dig and sued him for a share of the gold. Collaborating with Calvert, Schliemann had smuggled the treasure out of Turkey, alienating the Turkish authorities. He defended his “smuggling” in Turkey as an attempt to protect the items from corrupt local officials. Priam’s Treasure today remains a subject of international dispute. / Schliemann published Troja und seine Ruinen (Troy and Its Ruins) in 1875 and excavated the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus. In 1876, he began digging at Mycenae. Upon discovering the Shaft Graves, with their skeletons and more regal gold (including the Mask of Agamemnon), Schliemann cabled the king of Greece. The results were published in Mykena in 1878.

Although he had received permission in 1876 to continue excavation, Schliemann did not re-open the dig at Troy until 1878–1879, after another excavation in Ithaca designed to locate an actual site mentioned in the Odyssey. This was his second excavation at Troy. Emile Burnouf and Rudolph Virchow joined him there in 1879. Schliemann made a third excavation at Troy in 1882–1883, an excavation of Tiryns with Wilhelm Dörpfeld in 1884, and a fourth excavation at Troy, also with Dörpfeld (who emphasized the importance of strata), in 1888–1890.

End of Life

On August 1, 1890, Schliemann returned reluctantly to Athens, and in November traveled to Halle for an operation on his chronically infected ears. The doctors dubbed the operation a success, but his inner ear became painfully inflamed. Ignoring his doctors’ advice, he left the hospital and traveled to Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. From the latter, he planned to return to Athens in time for Christmas, but his ears became even worse. Too sick to make the boat ride from Naples to Greece, Schliemann remained in Naples, but managed to make a journey to the ruins of Pompeii. On Christmas Day he collapsed and died in a Naples hotel room on December 26, 1890. His corpse was then transported by friends to the First Cemetery in Athens. It was interred in a mausoleum shaped like a temple erected in ancient Greek style designed by Ernst Ziller in the form of a pedimental sculpture. The frieze circling the outside of the mausoleum shows Schliemann conducting the excavations at Mycenae and other sites. His magnificent residence in the city centre of Athens, houses today the Numismatic Museum of Athens.

Criticisms

There was very little organised archaeology in those days. Other big names of the time also had received no formal education in the subject, and also made mistakes.

Schliemann’s work leaves a lot to be desired. Further excavation of the Troy site by others indicated that the level he named the Troy of the Iliad was not that, although they retain the names given by Schliemann. His excavations were even condemned by later archaeologists as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. However, before Schliemann, not many people even believed in a real Troy. Nonetheless Charles Maclaren identified Hissarlik as the location of Troy as early as 1822. Kenneth W. Harl in the audiobook ‘Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor’ claims that Schliemann’s excavations were carried out in such methods that he did what the Greeks could not do to Troy, destroying and leveling down the entire city wall to the ground. One of the main problems of his work is that King Priam’s Treasure was putatively found in the Troy II level, of the primitive Early Bronze Age, long before Priam’s city of Troy VI or Troy VIIa in the prosperous and elaborate Mycenaean Age. Moreover, the finds were unique. These unique and elaborate gold artifacts do not appear to belong to the Early Bronze Age. In the 1960s William Niederland, a psychoanalyst, conducted a psychobiography of Schliemann to account for his unconscious motives. Niederland read thousands of Schliemann’s letters and found that he resented his father and blamed him for his mother’s death, as evidenced by vituperative letters to his sisters. According to Niederland Schliemann’s preoccupation (as he saw it) with graves and the dead reflected grief over the loss of his home and his efforts at resurrecting the Homeric dead should represent a restoration of his mother and nothing specifically in the early letters indicate that he was interested in Troy or classical archaeology. Whether this sort of evaluation is valid is debatable. He was accused of not always being scrupulous about providing the whole truth and that his father’s experiences gave him a sympathy to means that were not always legal or aboveboard (he has been accused of forging documents to divorce his wife and fill in false facts in his application for US citizenship). He is also accused of being a black market trader, though several documentaries from the late 80s and early 90s prefer to gloss over this accusation.

In 1972 Professor William Calder of the University of Colorado, speaking at a commemoration of Schliemann’s birthday, claimed that he had uncovered several possible untruths. Other investigators followed, such as Professor David Traill of the University of California. Schliemann has been accused of embellishing his stories. Schliemann claimed in his memoirs to have dined with President Millard Fillmore in the White House in 1850. However, newspapers of the day make no mention of such a meeting. Schliemann left California hastily to escape from his business partner, with whom he had conflicts. In the frontier society of the gold rush, cheating was punishable by lynching. He has been accused of not becoming an U.S. citizen in 1850 in California, as he claimed; but that he was granted citizenship in New York city instead in 1868. He has also been suspected of being granted citizenship in New York City on the basis of his false claim that he had been a long-time resident. The worst accusation against Schliemann, by academic standards, is that he may have fabricated Priam’s Treasure, or at least combined several disparate finds. His servant, Yannakis, claimed that he found some of it in a tomb some distance away, and that it contained no gold. Later it developed that he hired a goldsmith to manufacture some artifacts in Mycenaean style, and planted them at the site. However, these claims are rejected by a vast majority of archaeologists as they are only speculation. There is no definitive evidence that Schliemmann manufactured any material.

Works

• La Chine et le Japon au temps présent (1867)
• Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja (1868)
• Trojanische Altertümer (1874)
• Troja und seine Ruinen (1875)
• Mykena (1878)

He is a French customs official who argued that the shaped stones found in association with animal bones during canal dredging in the Somme Valley were actually ancient tools. He presented this assertion in Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes (Celtic and Antediluvian Antiques), (1847-1864).

Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes (10 September 1788–5 August 1868), sometimes referred to as Boucher de Perthes, was a French geologist and antiquary notable for his discovery, in about 1830, of flint tools in the gravels of the Somme valley.

Born at Rethel, in the Ardennes, he was the eldest son of Jules Armand Guillaume Boucher de Crèvecœur, botanist and customs officer, and of Etienne-Jeanne-Marie de Perthes (whose surname he was authorised by royal decree in 1818 to assume in addition to his father’s). In 1802 he entered government employ as an officer of customs. His duties kept him for six years in Italy, but upon his returning in 1811 he found rapid promotion at home, and finally was appointed, in March 1825, to succeed his father as director of the douane (customs office) at Abbeville, where he remained for the rest of his life.

His leisure time was chiefly devoted to the study of what was afterwards called the Stone Age and antediluvian man, as he expressed it. About the year 1830 he had found, in the gravels of the Somme valley, flints which in his opinion bore evidence of human handiwork; but not until many years afterwards did he make public the important discovery of a worked flint implement with remains of elephant and rhinoceros in the gravels of Menchecourt. This was in 1846.

In 1847 he commenced the issue of his monumental three volume work, Antiquites Celtiques Et Antediluviennes, a work in which he was the first to establish the existence of man in the Pleistocene or early Quaternary period. His views met with little approval, partly because he had previously propounded theories regarding the antiquity of man without facts to support them, partly because the figures in his book were badly executed and they included drawings of flints which showed no clear sign of workmanship.

In 1855 Dr Jean Paul Rigollot of Amiens strongly advocated the authenticity of the flint implements; but it was not until 1858 that Hugh Falconer saw the collection at Abbeville and induced Sir Joseph Prestwich in the following year to visit the locality. Prestwich then definitely agreed that the flint implements were the work of man, and that they occurred in undisturbed ground in association with remains of extinct mammalia.

Charles Lyell not only confirmed the enormous geological time periods of the stratifications, but indicated that the chalk plateau of Picardy, France had once been connected to the chalk lands of Kent, England and that the Strait of Dover or Pas de Calais was the recent result of very long term complex erosion forces.

In 1863 his discovery of a human jaw, together with worked flints, in a gravel-pit at Moulin-Quignon near Abbeville seemed to vindicate Boucher de Perthes entirely; but doubt was thrown on the antiquity of the human remains (owing to the possibility of interment), though not on the good faith of the discoverer, who was the same year made an officer of the Légion d’honneur. However, the ‘Moulin-Quigon jaw’ was a hoax, planted by one of Boucher de Perthes’ workers in response to an offer of a reward of 200 Francs for findings of human remains.

Although Boucher de Perthes was the first to establish that Europe had been populated by early man, he was not able to pinpoint the precise period, because the scientific frame of reference did not then exist. Today the hand axes of the Somme River district are widely accepted to be at least 500,000 years old and thus the product of Neanderthal populations, while some authorities think they may be as old as one million years and therefore associated with Homo erectus.

Boucher de Perthes displayed activity in many other directions. For more than thirty years he filled the presidential chair of the Société d’Emulation at Abbeville, to the publications of which he contributed articles on a wide range of subjects. He was the author of several tragedies, two books of fiction, several works of travel, and a number of books on economic and philanthropic questions.

In 1954, the Museum Boucher de Perthes was opened in Abbeville, with collections covering a wide range of materials and periods.

In 1956 he became a junior member of Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories until 1976, but in 1968 served as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York and shifted its research emphasis to the study of cancer. In 1994 he became its President for ten years, and then subsequently served as its Chancellor until 2007, when he was forced into retirement by controversy over several comments about race and intelligence. Between 1988 and 1992 he was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. He has written many science books, including the seminal textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968) about the DNA Structure discovery.

Biography

Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 6, 1928, the son of a businessman, also named James Dewey Watson, and Margaret Jean Mitchell. His father was of midwestern English descent. His mother’s father Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of Irish parents from Tipperary. Watson was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby he shared with his father. Watson appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged precocious youngsters to answer questions. Thanks to the liberal policy of University president Robert Hutchins, he enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. After reading Erwin Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics. He earned his B.S. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947. In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson describes the University of Chicago as an idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth, in contrast to his description of his later work at Harvard University.

He was attracted to the work of Salvador Luria. Luria eventually shared a Nobel Prize for his work on the Luria-Delbrück experiment, which concerned the nature of genetic mutations. Luria was part of a distributed group of researchers who were making use of the viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. Luria and Max Delbrück were among the leaders of this new “Phage Group”, an important movement of geneticists from experimental systems such as Drosophila towards microbial genetics. Early in 1948 Watson began his Ph.D. research in Luria’s laboratory at Indiana University and that spring he got to meet Delbrück in Luria’s apartment and again that summer during Watson’s first trip to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). The Phage Group was the intellectual medium within which Watson became a working scientist. Importantly, the members of the Phage Group had a sense that they were on the path to discovering the physical nature of the gene. In 1949 Watson took a course with Felix Haurowitz that included the conventional view of that time: that proteins were genes and able to replicate themselves. The other major molecular component of chromosomes, DNA, was thought by many to be a “stupid tetranucleotide”, serving only a structural role to support the proteins. However, even at this early time, Watson, under the influence of the Phage Group, was aware of the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment, which suggested that DNA was the genetic molecule. Watson’s research project involved using X-rays to inactivate bacterial viruses. He gained his Ph.D. in Zoology at Indiana University in 1950 (at age 22).

Watson then went to Copenhagen in September 1950 for a year of postdoctoral research, first heading to the laboratory of biochemist Herman Kalckar. Kalckar was interested in the enzymatic synthesis of nucleic acids, and wanted to use phages as an experimental system. Watson, however, wanted to explore the structure of DNA, and his interests did not coincide with Kalckar’s. After working part of the year with Kalcker, Watson spent the remainder of his time in Copenhagen conducting experiments with microbial physiologist Ole Maaloe, then a member of the Phage Group. The experiments, which Watson had learned of during the previous summer’s Cold Spring Harbor phage conference, included the use of radioactive phosphate as a tracer to determine which molecular components of phage particles actually infect the target bacteria during viral infection. The intention was to determine whether protein or DNA was the genetic material, but upon consultation with Max Delbrück, they determined that their results were inconclusive and could not specifically identify the newly labeled molecules as DNA. Watson never developed a constructive interaction with Kalckar, but he did accompany Kalckar to a meeting in Italy where Watson saw Maurice Wilkins talk about his X-ray diffraction data for DNA. Watson was now certain that DNA had a definite molecular structure that could be solved.

In 1951 the chemist Linus Pauling published his model of the protein alpha helix, a result that grew out of Pauling’s relentless efforts in X-ray crystallography and molecular model building. After obtaining some results from his phage and other experimental research conducted at Indiana University, Statens seruminstitute (Denmark), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology, Watson now had the desire to learn to perform X-ray diffraction experiments so that he could work to determine the structure of DNA. That summer, Luria met John Kendrew and arranged for a new postdoctoral research project for Watson in England.[7]

In 1968, Watson married Elizabeth Lewis and became the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Between 1970 and 1972 Watson’s two sons were born and by 1974 the young family made CSH their permanent residence. Watson served as the Laboratory’s Director and President for 35 years, and later assumed the role of Chancellor. In October 2007 Watson resigned as a result of controversial remarks about race made to the press. Watson has one son who has schizophrenia.

Structure of DNA

In October 1951, James Watson moved to Clare College, Cambridge and started at the Cavendish Laboratory, the physics department of the University of Cambridge, with a fellowship from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Here he shared an office with Francis Crick where they found they had similar scientific interests and initiated a collaboration to discover the structure of DNA. Crick soon solved the mathematical equations that govern helical diffraction theory; Watson knew all of the key DNA results of the Phage Group.

In late 1951 Crick and Watson began a series of informal exchanges with Maurice Wilkins during which Wilkins gave some of Rosalind Franklin’s findings to Watson and Crick without her permission or knowledge. In November, Watson attended a seminar by Franklin. She spoke about the X-ray diffraction data she had collected with Raymond Gosling at King’s College London. The data indicated that DNA was a helix of some sort. Soon after this seminar, Watson and Crick constructed an incorrect molecular model of DNA in which the phosphate backbones were on the inside of the structure. Franklin asserted that the phosphates almost certainly were on the outside, not the inside. Watson and Crick eventually came to see that she was right and used this information in their final determination of the helical structure. In 1952, the final details of the chemical structure of the DNA backbone were determined by biochemists like Alexander Todd.

During 1952, Crick and Watson had been asked not to work on making molecular models of the structure of DNA. Instead, Watson’s official assignment was to perform X-ray diffraction experiments on tobacco mosaic virus. Tobacco mosaic virus was the first virus to be identified (1886) and purified (1935). Since electron microscopy revealed that virus crystals form inside infected plants, it made sense to isolate this virus for study by X-ray crystallography. Early X-ray diffraction images for tobacco mosaic virus had been collected before World War II. By 1954, Watson had deduced from his X-ray diffraction images that the tobacco mosaic virus had a helical structure. Despite his official assignment, the lure of solving the puzzle of DNA structure continued to tantalize Watson; with his friend Crick, he continued to think about how to determine the structure of DNA.

In April 1952, Watson’s Ph.D. research adviser, Luria, was to speak at a meeting in England. However, Luria was not allowed to travel due to cold war fears over his Marxist leanings. Watson used Luria’s speaking slot to talk about his own work with radioactive DNA and the results of others in the Phage Group that indicated the genetic material of phages was DNA. During this meeting, Watson discussed with others prior discoveries by other researchers such as the calculated width of the B-form DNA molecule as determined by X-ray diffraction studies. By 1952 estimates from X-ray data and electron microscopy agreed that the diameter of DNA was about 2 nanometers.

Watson and Crick benefited from three travel-related strokes of luck in 1952. First, Erwin Chargaff visited England in 1952 and inspired Watson and Crick to learn more about nucleotide biochemistry. There are four nucleobases: guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A), and thymine (T) in DNA. The so-called Chargaff ratios experimental results indicated that the amounts of G and C are equal and the amounts of A and T are equal. Jerry Donohue explained to Watson and Crick the correct structures of the four bases. The second travel-related event was that Linus Pauling’s plans to visit England were disrupted. His planned visit was canceled for political reasons and he never gained access to the King’s College X-ray diffraction data for DNA until it was published in 1953. The third was that when Chargaff and Pauling crossed the Atlantic together, they did not get along, so Pauling avoided Chargaff all across the ocean when they could have compared notes on DNA’s base pairs.

In 1953, Crick and Watson were given permission by their lab director and Wilkins to again try to make a structural model of DNA. At this time, Crick and Watson became aware of a research progress report containing some of Franklin’s findings. This report contained the data that she had previously discussed in her research seminar of November 1951. Crick and Watson continued to make use of Franklin’s results in their thinking about the structure of DNA.

Breakthrough

Watson’s key contribution was in discovering the nucleotide base pairs, the key to the structure and function of DNA. This key discovery was made in the Pauling “tradition”, by playing with molecular models.

A GC base pair demonstrating three intermolecular hydrogen bonds

An AT base pair demonstrating two intermolecular hydrogen bonds

Since he would have to wait for the Cavendish machine shop to make tin models of the four nucleobases, Watson, on February 28, 1953 made a molecule model of each using a straight edge, an exacto knife, white cardboard and paste. These molecules are all flat in their ring structures, so Watson could slide the cardboard models around on a table and examine how they might interact and fit together. After looking at the possible arrangements of his cardboard molecule models, Watson soon realized that the larger two-ring A and G nucleobases (technically referred to as purines) could be paired with the smaller one-ring T and C nucleobases, known as pyrimidines. Watson examined the possibility of hydrogen bonds between the pairs of purines and pyrimidines. After moving the A and T molecules around on the table he sat at, he brought together the distal (relative to its five-member ring) nitrogen of the A and the correct nitrogen-based hydrogen of T. Fortunately, the A and T were lying on the table both “face up” in that they were in the orientation as they occur in DNA and Watson then noticed the possibility of the second hydrogen bond involving an oxygen atom. He quickly saw that the other pair, C’s nitrogen and G’s nitrogen-based hydrogen had a similar relationship and that those two molecules formed three such bonds. As the accompanying diagram indicates, all five hydrogens involved have a covalent bond to a nitrogen (which has no “double” bond) and form the weaker hydrogen bond with either a nitrogen or an oxygen that each have one double valence bond to a carbon atom.

Watson then saw that the two pairs could be superimposed on each other with similar overall structure. In particular, the hexagonal rings were equidistant and the relative orientations of the five-member rings of the “big” molecules, A and G were the same. The nitrogens with the “squiggly” lines are the ones that attach, as “ladder rungs”, to the helical backbone and that these nitrogen atoms are equidistant and also superimpose in the two pairs, allowing the helical structure to be smooth. Watson sensed that too many pieces were falling into place for this to be anything but the answer. He was correct. The base pairs discovered by Watson were consistent with the biochemical data Chargaff had already published.

Nobel Prize

Diagram showing the key structural components in the chemical structure of DNA. The actual 3D structure is shown at DNA.

Watson and Crick proceeded to deduce the double helix structure of DNA which they submitted to the journal Nature and was subsequently published on April 25, 1953^. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their research on the structure of nucleic acids. Some regret that Franklin did not live long enough to share in the Nobel Prize. Watson mentions in his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, that he was refused a $1,000 raise in salary after winning the Nobel.

The Double Helix

In 1968 Watson wrote The Double Helix, one of the Modern Library’s 100 best non-fiction books. The account is the sometimes painful story of not only the discovery of the structure of DNA, but the personalities, conflicts and controversy surrounding their work.

Controversy attended the publication of the book. Harvard professor Richard Lewontin wrote that the book had “debased the currency of his [Watson's] own life”, and molecular biologist Robert L. Sinsheimer described Watson’s portrayal of science as a “clawing climb up a slippery slope, impeded by the authority of fools, to be made with cadged data … with malice toward most, and charity toward none.” It was originally to be published by Harvard University Press, but after objections from both Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, among others, Watson’s home university where he had been a member of the biology faculty since 1955, dropped the book and it was instead published by a commercial publisher, an incident which caused some scandal. Watson’s original title was to have been “Honest Jim,” in part to raise the ethical questions of bypassing Franklin to gain access to her X-ray diffraction data before they were published. If all that mattered was beating Pauling to the structure of DNA, then Franklin’s cautious approach to analysis of the X-ray data was simply an obstacle that Watson needed to run around. Wilkins and others were there at the right time to help Watson and Crick do so.

The Double Helix changed the way the public viewed scientists and the way they work. In the same way, Watson’s first textbook, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, set a new standard for textbooks, particularly through the use of concept heads—brief declarative subheadings. Its style has been emulated by almost all succeeding textbooks. His next great success was Molecular Biology of the Cell, although here his role was more that of coordinator of an outstanding group of scientist-writers. His third textbook was Recombinant DNA, which used the ways in which genetic engineering has brought us so much new information about how organisms function. The textbooks are still in print.

Genome project

In 1989, Watson’s achievement and the success led to his appointment as the Head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until April 10, 1992. Watson left the Genome Project after conflicts with the new NIH Director, Bernadine Healy. Watson was opposed to Healy’s attempts to acquire patents on gene sequences, and any ownership of the “laws of nature.” Two years before stepping down from the Genome Project, he had stated his opinion on this long and ongoing controversy which he saw as an illogical barrier to research; he said, “The nations of the world must see that the human genome belongs to the world’s people, as opposed to its nations.” He left within weeks of the 1992 announcement that the NIH would be applying for patents on brain-specific cDNAs. In 1994, Watson became President of CSHL. Francis Collins took over the role as Director of the Human Genome Project. He became the second person to publish his fully sequenced genome online, after it was presented to him on May 31, 2007 by 454 Life Sciences Corporation in collaboration with scientists at the Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine. “‘I am putting my genome sequence on line to encourage the development of an era of personalized medicine, in which information contained in our genomes can be used to identify and prevent disease and to create individualized medical therapies,’ said CSHL Chancellor Watson.”

Awards and decorations

Career

At Harvard University, starting in 1956, Watson achieved a series of academic promotions from Assistant Professor, to Associate Professor to full Professor of Biology. He championed a switch in focus for the school from classical biology to molecular biology, stating that disciplines such as ecology, developmental biology, taxonomy, physiology, etc. had stagnated and could only progress once the underlying disciplines of molecular biology and biochemistry had elucidated their underpinnings, going so far as to discourage their study by students. He left the school in 1976.

Watson joined the staff of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968. In a retrospective summary of his accomplishments there, Bruce Stillman, the laboratory’s president said, “Jim Watson created a research environment that is unparalleled in the world of science.” It was “under his direction [that the Lab has] made major contributions to understanding the genetic basis of cancer.” Generally in his roles as Director, President, and Chancellor, Watson led CSHL to its present day mission, which is “dedicat[ion] to exploring molecular biology and genetics in order to advance the understanding and ability to diagnose and treat cancers, neurological diseases, and other causes of human suffering.” In October, 2007, Watson was suspended following criticism of views on race and intelligence attributed to him, and a week later, on the 25th, he retired at the age of 79 from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from what the lab called “nearly 40 years of distinguished service”, In a statement, Watson attributed his retirement to his age, and circumstances that he could never have anticipated or desired.

In January 2007, Watson accepted the invitation of Leonor Beleza, president of the Champalimaud Foundation, to become the head of the foundation’s scientific council, an advisory organ. He will be in charge of selecting the remaining council members.

As of 2008, Watson is the Institute advisor for the newly-formed Allen Institute for Brain Science . The Institute, located in Seattle, Washington, was founded in 2003 by Philanthropists Paul G. Allen and Jody Allen Patton as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and medical research organization. A multidisciplinary group of neuroscientists, molecular biologists, informaticists, engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, and computational biologists have been brought together to form the scientific core of the Allen Institute. Utilizing the mouse model system, these fields have joined together to investigate expression of 20,000 genes in the adult mouse brain and to map gene expression to a cellular level beyond neuroanatomic boundaries. The data generated from this joint effort is contained in the publicly available Allen Brain Atlas application located at www.brain-map.org. Upon completion of the Allen Brain Atlas, this consortium of scientists will pursue additional questions to further our understanding of neuronal circuitry and the neuroanatomic framework that defines the functionality of the brain.

Honorary degrees received

Professional & honorary affiliations

George Wells Beadle (October 22, 1903 – June 9, 1989) was an American scientist in the field of genetics, and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Nobel laureate who with Edward Lawrie Tatum discovered the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells.

Beadle and Tatum’s key experiments involved exposing the bread mold Neurospora crassa to x-rays, causing mutations. In a series of experiments, they showed that these mutations caused changes in specific enzymes involved in metabolic pathways. These experiments led them to propose a direct link between genes and enzymatic reactions, known as the “one gene, one enzyme”.

Biography

Beadle was born in Wahoo, Nebraska. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in agronomy from the University of Nebraska’s College of Agriculture in 1926 where he was a member of FarmHouse fraternity. At the recommendation of his advisor, Franklin D. Keim, he then entered graduate school in agronomy at Cornell University, intending to study ecology. He soon switched his focus to genetics and cytology, pursuing research on maize (corn) genetics under Rollins Adams Emerson—including some collaboration with Barbara McClintock. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1931.

For post-doctoral work, Beadle joined Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “fly lab” at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Alfred Sturtevant and others on Drosophila genetics. There, working with Boris Ephrussi, he helped develop a technique for transplanting foreign cells in fly larvae (creating a third eye in flies’ abdomens); this technique was used to demonstrate that some mutations affecting eye color involved genes that controlled specific metabolic steps in the production of eye pigment. In an effort to precisely characterize the reactions and substances involved, he recruited biochemist Edward Tatum to work on the pigment problem as well. They eventually isolated and identified the pigment precursor found in the “vermilion” mutant, but did so shortly after an independent German group. Over the course of his Drosophila work, Beadle was a professor at Harvard University, then Stanford University.

With Tatum, Beadle switched his focus to a model organism more suited to biochemical genetics: Neurospora. By constructing mutant strains that required specific nutritional elements (amino acids or vitamins), they established that individual gene mutations were responsible for individual steps in the metabolism and synthesis of vital nutrients. This led, in 1941, to propose the “one gene-one enzyme hypothesis,” the idea that a gene specifies a single enzyme, rather than a complex set of characteristics (as was generally assumed).

In 1946, with the support of Linus Pauling, Beadle was recruited to head the newly reorganized biology division of Caltech; the department was one of the prototypes of what would become known as molecular biology. During the early Cold War, Beadle was outspoken in his defense of colleagues under investigation for suspected Communist ties, and also worked on defining and publicizing the potential dangers of nuclear weapons-related radiation. In 1958, Beadle and Tatum were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their work on biochemical genetics. Beadle went on to serve as president of the University of Chicago from 1961-1968, helping—through fund-raising and recruitment—to re-establish its reputation as a top research university. He published a book, The Language of Life, in 1966.

Following his retirement as university president, Beadle returned to research, now on the evolutionary relationship between corn and teosinte. He continued research until the late 1970s, when Alzheimer’s disease made continued intellectual work impossible. George Beadle died in 1989; his second wife Muriel Barnett Beadle died in 1994. He had one son, David (b. 1931), with his first wife Marion Hill Beadle.

Biography

Early life

Dobzhansky was born on January 25, 1900 in Nemyriv, Ukraine. An only child, his father Grigory Dobzhansky was a mathematics teacher, and his mother was Sophia Voinarsky. In 1910 the family moved to Kiev, Ukraine. At high school, Dobzhansky collected butterflies and decided to become a biologist. In 1915, he met Victor Luchnik who convinced him to specialize in beetles instead. Dobzhansky attended the University of Kiev between 1917 and 1921, where he then studied until 1924. He then moved to Leningrad, Russia, to study under Yuri Filipchenko, where a Drosophila melanogaster lab had been established.

On August 8, 1924, Dobzhansky married geneticist Natalia “Natasha” Sivertzeva who was working with I. I. Schmalhausen in Kiev, Ukraine. The Dobzhanskys had one daughter, Sophie, who later married the American anthropologist Michael D. Coe.

This period was one of great social upheaval in Ukraine and the Russian Empire. The First World War was followed by the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then a civil war that established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a part of the Soviet Union.

America

Dobzhansky emigrated to the United States in 1927 on a scholarship from International Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation arriving in New York on December 27. He worked with Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University, who had pioneered the use of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in genetics experiments. He followed Morgan to the California Institute of Technology from 1930 to 1940. Dobzhansky is credited for having taken fruit fly research out of the laboratory and “into the field”, having discovered that different regional varieties of flies were more similar to each other genetically than to flies from other regions.

In 1937 he published one of the major works of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics, entitled Genetics and the Origin of Species, which amongst other things defined evolution as “a change in the frequency of an allele within a gene pool”. Dobzhansky’s work was instrumental in spreading the idea that it is through mutations in genes that natural selection takes place. Also in 1937, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. During this time he had a very public falling out with one of his Drosophila collaborators, Alfred Sturtevant, based primarily in professional competition.

Dobzhansky returned to Columbia University from 1940 to 1962. He was one of the signatories of the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question. He then moved to the Rockefeller Institute (shortly to become Rockefeller University) until his retirement in 1971.

Final illness and the Light of Evolution

On June 1, 1968 it was discovered that Dobzhansky was suffering from lymphocytic leukemia, a chronic form of leukemia, and given a few months to a few years to live. Natasha died of coronary thrombosis on February 22, 1969. In 1971 he retired but continued working as an emeritus professor, moving to the University of California, Davis where his student Francisco Jose Ayala was made assistant professor.

Meanwhile, he continued working and published a famous essay “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”. A loyal defender of Darwinian evolution, Dobzhansky, according to Francisco J. Ayala “was a religious man”. Dobzhansky himself spoke of God as creating through evolution, and considered himself a communicant of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

His leukemia became more serious in the summer of 1975, on November 11 he made a trip to San Jacinto, California where he died of heart failure on December 18. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Californian wilderness.

Bibliography

Books

• Dobzhansky, Th. 1937. Genetics and the Origin of Species. Columbia University Press, New York. (2nd ed., 1941; 3rd ed., 1951)
• The Biological Basis of Human Freedom (1954).
• Dunn, L. C., & Dobzhansky, Th. 1946. Heredity, Race, and Society. The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., New York.
• Dobzhansky, Th. 1955. Evolution, Genetics, & Man. Wiley & Sons, New York.
• Dobzhansky, Th. 1962. Mankind Evolving. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
• Dobzhansky, Th. 1967. The Biology of Ultimate Concern. New American Library, New York.
• Dobzhansky, Th. 1970. Genetics of the Evolutionary Process. Columbia University Press, New York.
• Genetic Diversity and Human Equality (1973).
• Dobzhansky, Th., F.J. Ayala, G.L. Stebbins & J.W. Valentine. 1977. Evolution. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco.
• Dobzhansky, Th. 1981. Dobzhansky’s Genetics of Natural Populations I-XLIII. R.C. Lewontin, J.A. Moore, W.B. Provine & B. Wallace, eds. Columbia University Press, New York. (reprints the 43 papers in this series, all but two of which were authored or co-authored by Dobzhansky)

Papers

• Dobzhansky, Th. 1973. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” The American Biology Teacher 35: (March): 125-129.
• Dobzhansky, T., and O. Pavlovsky. 1957. “An experimental study of interaction between genetic drift and natural selection” Evolution 11: 311-319.

It was believed that the factor must be a protein,  but in 1944, Avery and his coworkers discovered that it was pure DNA  with no protein present. This marked a turning point in the understanding of genetics, since DNA had previously been believed to by a minor player among proteins involved in passing genetic characteristics, and essentially amounted to demonstrating that DNA itself was the unit of genetic inheritance known as the gene.

Oswald Theodore Avery (October 21, 1877–2 February 1955) was a Canadian-born American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller University Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and was a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for his discovery in 1944 with his co-workers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty that DNA is the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.

The Nobel laureate Arne Tiselius said that Avery was the most deserving scientist not to receive the Nobel Prize for his work.

The lunar crater Avery was named in his honor.

Early life and career

Oswald Theodore Avery was born on October 21, 1877 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The second of three sons of Elizabeth Crowdy and Joseph Francis Avery. A Baptist minister in England, Joseph Avery and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1873. Established as a well-respected pastor in Halifax, he moved his family to New York City in 1887, where he was appointed pastor of the Mariner’s Temple Baptist mission church on the lower East Side. Each member of the family participated in the church: Elizabeth was involved with charities and the newsletter while young “Ossie” and his oldest brother, Ernest, often played clarinet on the church steps to attract new attendees. Ernest died early in 1892 at the age of eighteen, probably from tuberculosis. Several months later, Reverend Avery also died. Following their deaths, the then fifteen-year old Oswald assumed the paternal role for his youngest brother, Roy, a part he would also play some years later to his cousin, Minnie Wandell, whom Roy often affectionately referred to as “little sister.”

After attending the New York Male Grammar School, Avery went to the Colgate Academy and then Colgate University, where he excelled in literature, public speaking, and debate. While at Colgate, he was a classmate of Harry Emerson Fosdick, who would become one of the most notable clergymen in America; it is likely that when Avery started at Colgate he also intended to enter the ministry. Avery received a BA in the humanities in 1900. For reasons that are not clear, and despite the absence of any scientific background, after college Avery chose a career in medicine and entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He received his medical degree in 1904.

Desiring greater intellectual stimulation, and frustrated by his inability to help some of his patients, Avery moved in 1907 to laboratory work at the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn, the first privately endowed bacteriological research institute in the United States. Since the laboratory was also associated with Long Island College Hospital, Avery’s duties included teaching student nurses. It was here that he acquired his best known and most enduring nickname, “The Professor,” which was often affectionately shortened to “Fess.” The Hoagland Laboratory’s director, Benjamin White, instructed Avery in laboratory techniques and biochemistry. Avery initially worked on the bacteriology of yogurt, but soon developed an interest in tuberculosis after White suffered a severe case of the infectious pulmonary disease. It was during this time that Avery established what his biographer René J. Dubos called the pattern of his career, the “systematic effort to understand the biological activities of pathogenic bacteria through a knowledge of their chemical composition.”

Avery received U.S. citizenship on August 1, 1918. He served as a captain in the U. S. Army Medical Corps from September 1918 until January 1919. In 1923 he became a faculty member at the Rockefeller Institute, where he worked until his retirement in 1948. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1949 to be near his brother and family, and died there in 1955.

Breakthrough discovery

Main article: Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment

For many years, genetic information was thought to be contained in cell protein. Continuing the research done by Frederick Griffith in 1928, Avery worked with MacLeod and McCarty on the mystery of inheritance. He had received emeritus status from the Rockefeller Institute in 1943, but continued working for five years, proving that not all breakthrough discoveries are achieved by younger people (by this time he was in his late sixties). Techniques were available to remove various organic compounds from bacteria, and if the remaining organic compounds were still able to cause R strain bacteria to transform then the substances removed couldn’t be the carrier of genes. S strain bacteria first had the large cellular structures removed. Then they were treated with protease enzymes, which removed the proteins from the cells before the remainder was placed with R strain bacteria. The R strain bacteria transformed, meaning that proteins didn’t carry the genes for causing the disease. Then the remnants of the R strain bacteria were treated with a deoxyribonuclease enzyme which removed the DNA. After this treatment, the R strain bacteria no longer transformed. This indicated that DNA was the carrier of genes in cells.

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase furthered Avery’s research in 1952 with the Hershey-Chase experiment. These experiments paved the way for Watson and Crick’s discovery of the helical structure of DNA, and thus the birth of modern genetics and molecular biology. Of this event, Avery wrote in a letter to his brother, “It’s lots of fun to blow bubbles but it’s wiser to prick them yourself before someone else tries to.”

Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg stated that Avery and his laboratory provided “the historical platform of modern DNA research” and “betokened the molecular revolution in genetics and biomedical science generally.”

Donald Berry, an expert in biostatistics at the University of Texas, used the case of American cyclist Floyd Landis to point up flaws in anti-doping procedures, but cautioned that the problems he uncovered apply across the board to lab tests designed to ferret out athletes who cheat by using performance enhancing substances.

Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France cycling race victory after a drug test showed he had taken synthetic testosterone to boost his endurance.

The cyclist has maintained his innocence, but an arbitration court in June dismissed his last-chance appeal to overturn the test results.

Writing in the British science journal Nature, Berry argues that the tests performed by the French national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) that condemned Landis to ignominy and barred him from competition for two years were “non-informative” and potentially subject to error.

While Berry does not have an opinion as to the cyclist’s guilt or innocence, he is highly critical of what he called the “inherent flaws” in current testing practices.

“The situation in drug-testing labs worldwide must be remedied,” he said. “Cheaters evade detection, innocents are falsely accused and sport is ultimately suffering.”

The same type of tests that ruin careers would be rejected by regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration as scientifically unsound for diagnostic tests to detect disease, he told AFP in an interview.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) medical director Patrick Schamasch, contacted ahead the commentary’s publication, would not comment directly on the study but said: “What we are doing in the area of doping is the most advanced in terms of certitude.”

He compared the level of precision used in anti-doping analyses to legal standards used in assessing medical data.

At issue are two kinds of intertwined error, Berry argues.

One is a type of reasoning sometimes called the “prosecutor’s fallacy”, which conflates the odds that something could happen by chance alone with the probability of innocence or guilt.

If there is only a one-in-100,000 likelihood, for example, of a random DNA match for a crime suspect, one might be tempted to conclude that the chances he is innocent are the same — one-in-100,000, or 0.001 percent.

But suppose the suspect lives in a city with million residents. That means about 10 other people have the same DNA profile, and that any one of them — absent other evidence — could have been at the crime scene. Suddenly the suspect has gone from almost certain guilt to likely innocence.

A woman in Britain and another in the Netherlands were both convicted within the last decade of multiple murder on the basis of such reasoning, though the first case was overturned in 2003 and the other is under review.

In the case of Landis, who had no previous record of doping violations, the chances that the positive result could result from anything except cheating — a lab error, an abnormally high natural occurrence of testosterone — were dismissed as not credible.

The problem, says Berry, is that for the actual process used by doping labs there is no body of scientific data to show just how rare “false positives” or “false negatives” really are, and that such data is essential for interpreting lab results.

World Anti-Doping Agency (WAPA) guidelines say that any ratio of two specific types of testosterone in the body higher than four-to-one is suspicious, and should trigger further tests.

“It is proper to establish threshold values such as these, but only to define a hypothesis. A positive test criterion requires further investigation of known samples” and individual variation, Berry said.

A study published last month highlights just how variable testosterone test results can be from one individual to the next.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm gave a single dose of testosterone to three groups of men who had either one, two or zero copies of a particular gene, known as UGT2B17.

More than 40 percent of the men missing the gene went undetected by the doping test, while those with two copies of the gene showed testosterone levels 20 times higher.

Once statistical adjustments were made for the genotypes, the differences disappeared.

Berry also pointed to the need for careful sample handling, advanced technician training, and precise instrument calibration during the lab analysis of the urine samples upon which the doping tests are based.

“The process in unlikely to be error free,” he said, pointing out that the American Arbitration Association that ultimately ruled against Landis initially threw out the result of the French lab screening due to improper procedures.

He also called for greater transparency, including standard testing procedure, unambiguous criteria for determining positive results, and blinded experiments.

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Shortly after the start of the lecture, titled “Back from the Brink–the Science of Survival,” a large bang reverberated around Bunkyo Civic Hall’s lecture room in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo. Oxygen masks plunged down from the ceiling of a mock airplane cabin on the stage for four volunteers pretending to be passengers in an airplane emergency scenario.

“You are in that jet at 8,848 meters [as high as the summit of Mt. Everest]. One of the windows has blown out!” Montgomery shouted excitedly. “Quick! Put these oxygen masks on!”

At the lecture, organized by The Yomiuri Shimbun and the British Council, Montgomery said that in such a situation passengers on the plane would die within minutes without oxygen masks.

Montgomery explained that to aid survival drastic changes occur in the human body when it faces a low oxygen situation or other kinds of extreme conditions, such as being cast adrift at sea without drinking water.

Mountaineers, for example, can survive the conditions of high altitude with its low oxygen levels because the number of red cells in their blood, which deliver oxygen throughout the body, dramatically increase as they climb the mountain, Montgomery said.

“There are 100 trillion cells in our bodies–that’s 80 times the total number of fish in all the seas, all the rivers and lakes,” Montgomery said.

To stay alive, humans need to get oxygen to every single one of these cells, he said.

The audience was fascinated by this and subsequent sections of the lecture in which Montgomery gave easy explanations of complicated scientific matters, often inviting members of the audience to join his experiments on the stage.

The lectures continue until Thursday, with the doctor revealing the human body’s reaction to other kinds of extreme conditions, such as the blistering heat of deserts, the freezing temperatures encountered on snow-covered mountains and encounters with killer sharks in the sea.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) — Patients infected with HIV might be able to live symptom free without medicines as aggressive treatment with newer drugs better control the disease, the head of U.S. infectious disease research said today.

While research on a vaccine continues, early treatment with the current AIDS drugs also could prevent some people from getting infected, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, Maryland, said at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. Scientists should conduct more studies to assess that theory, he said.

Current drugs reduce the amount of the virus in the body to undetectable levels, making HIV a treatable disease similar to diabetes or arthritis, Fauci said. Still, only one person is getting the drugs for every three people infected, he said. There were 2.7 million new infections in 2007, according to a July report by UNAIDS, and an estimated 33 people worldwide have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“ A cure will likely require early diagnosis and treatment,” Fauci said. “Studies need to be done in next few years to determine if very aggressive therapy early on will allow us to get a functional cure.”

Treating patients soon after they are infected may protect the immune system and suppress the virus so patients can slowly stop taking the drugs, Fauci said. Merck & Co.’s Isentress and other new classes of drugs may help do this, he added.

Timing Essential

“I believe we will be able to, in some patients, not very many, eradicate HIV microbiologically and we will have a functional cure in others,” Fauci said. “But this will likely require aggressive drug regimens and rely on the timing of initiating therapy.”

A vaccine targeted at people with a specific genetic makeup may also be possible in the next two decades though two vaccine experiments failed, Fauci said. Merck ended development of its experimental AIDS vaccine last year after trials showed it was ineffective. The U.S. government in July said it had stopped a test of its vaccine, which was similar to Merck’s product.

Some medicines already can be taken immediately following exposure to prevent infection in infants. Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH’s nevirapine, in combination with other drugs, can reduce the risk of transmission from 30 percent to less than 2 percent between HIV-positive mothers and their infants.

AIDS treatments made by Gilead Sciences Inc. will be tested in healthy people to see if they can prevent the lethal disease, according to the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a New York- based group that promotes prevention. Pfizer Inc.’s Selzentry is being studied as a topical cream to prevent transmission.

Industry Support

Continued investment from the pharmaceutical industry, something that may be waning, is needed to develop the current drugs as preventative treatments, said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS in a speech today in Mexico City. By 2031, most patents on existing drugs will have expired, cutting into company profits.

“We have to make sure the drug development remains in step with the evolution of the virus and that industry continues to invest,” Piot said. “There are worrying signs that that isn’t the case and that is something we have to put on the table.”

More effective prevention methods that target men who have sex with men, sex workers and drug users also are necessary to reduce infection rates, Piot said. Health officials must communicate prevention messages more effectively, he said.

“No company will try to sell soap if they haven’t done research for the community they are trying to sell to,” Piot said. “It would pay off if we could bring that experience from the business world to our amateur approaches.”

http://www.bloomberg.com

Bruce Ivins, 62, killed himself with a prescription drug overdose last week as prosecutors were preparing to charge him in the attacks that left five people dead and sickened 17 others, in a case that brought fears of bio-terrorism on the heels of the September 11 attacks.

After a seven-year-long investigation during which authorities wrongly named another scientist as a “person of interest” in the case, officials said they were wrapping up the probe and would declare the case closed.

“Based upon the totality of the evidence we had gathered against him, we are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks,” US attorney Jeffrey Taylor told a news conference.

“We are now beginning the process of concluding this investigation,” he said. “We will formally close the case.”

Officials said they began focusing on Ivins as a suspect last year after new forensic science allowed them to trace the anthrax back to the scientist.

Investigators concluded that the anthrax that was mailed to prominent journalists and politicians in 2001 could have only come from a single flask of parent spores that only Ivins maintained and had created.

In a strange twist, Ivins, who worked for 18 years at the US biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been working on a vaccine against the disease that same year, Taylor said.

But authorities painted a picture of a scientist wrestling with demons.

“Ivins had a history of mental health problems and was facing a difficult time professionally in the summer and fall of 2001 because an anthrax vaccine he was working on was failing,” Taylor said.

In one email to a co-worker, Ivins stated that he had “incredible paranoid delusional thoughts at times” and feared he might not be able to control his behavior, Taylor said.

Recently, the federal official said, Ivins had made a threat in his group therapy session to kill people who had “wronged him” after he learned he might be indicted in the case.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released Wednesday documents from their massive investigation code-named Amerithrax, including dozens of search warrants, police reports and anonymous letters.

Officials said they were compelled to disclose the evidence even though no one was charged due to the high public interest in the case.

But Ivins’ attorneys insisted that their client was innocent and that the US Department of Justice had no case.

“The government’s press conference was an orchestrated dance of carefully worded statements, heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence — all contorted to create the illusion of guilt by Dr. Ivins,” his attorneys, Paul Kemp and Thomas DeGonia, said in a statement.

“The government would have the American people believe that after seven years and more than 15 million dollars of taxpayer money, they have found the individual responsible for the heinous attacks of the fall of 2001. Nothing could be farther from the truth,” they said.

“In truth, Bruce Ivins was a devoted husband and father who worked for more than 30 years to defend his nation and its soldiers against the terrible effects of Anthrax.”

His lawyers said hundreds of soldiers, scientists and family members attended a funeral service for Ivins on Wednesday.

“No one who attended that service could believe that Dr. Ivins committed any crime,” they said.

Since Ivins’ suicide on July 29, a mixed picture has emerged of the highly-decorated scientist, who had a moustache and hair neatly parted to the side.

Friends and colleagues have described him as a model citizen who played guitar in his church folk group, an avid gardener and an active volunteer with the Red Cross.

He was also said to be a loving father and husband to his wife of 33 years, Diane, and their 24-year-old twins.

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