Cruel
injustice over search for Secret of Life
By Robert Matthews
In the early 1950s, the American psychologist
Solomon Asch performed an experiment to determine just how easily
people cave in to peer group pressure. Those taking part sat alongside
five other people, and were asked to judge the length of a line.
Unknown to them, the five others were all accomplices of Asch,
instructed to give a patently absurd answer. Yet such was the
power of the peer group that 70 per cent of individuals taking
part went along with the majority view.
Having endured yet another week of ballyhoo
about the Human Genome Project, DNA and the double helix, my only
doubt about Asch's findings is that his figure of 70 per cent
may be too low. Certainly in the case of DNA, I doubt if one scientist
in a hundred would dissent from the view that James Watson and
Francis Crick discovered the Secret of Life in the double helix
structure of DNA. Yet they didn't, and it isn't.
I should confess that until recently I too believed
the scientific fairy story of James and Francis and the Secret
of Life. What woke me from its spell was an article in the recent
Nature supplement marking the 50th anniversary of the discovery
of the double helix. It was written by Dr Maclyn McCarty, of the
Rockefeller University, New York, the sole surviving member of
a team led by Oswald Avery, the biochemist. By the end of the
article, it was clear that Avery and his colleagues have been
the victims of a truly shocking miscarriage of academic justice.
To explain why, consider this question: what
led Watson and Crick to work on DNA in the first place? Since
1869 this rather boring molecule had been known to lurk in the
central nucleus of cells, and was still regarded as boring when
Watson and Crick began focusing on it 80 years later. The consensus
was that the key to the Secret of Life - the rules governing all
living cells - took the form of far more complex cellular chemicals
known as proteins.
So what made Watson and Crick think otherwise?
As both freely admitted in their biographies, it was the experiments
of Avery and his colleagues. Working with strains of pneumonia
bacteria, Avery's group found that it could extract a substance
that compelled one bacterium to take on a trait of another - and
then pass it on to its offspring. Whatever this substance was,
it seemed to possess the attributes of "genes", the
long-sought carriers of the instructions for life itself. But
was it a protein or DNA?
In 1944, after years of careful work, Avery
and his group published the first hard evidence that genes are
made from DNA. If they were right, the group could claim to have
identified the key to the Secret of Life. Not surprisingly, their
results were given a very tough time. Critics pointed out that
only one trait had been changed; others suspected that the DNA
was contaminated. Clearly, more work was needed before Avery and
his colleagues could be credited with having cracked the Secret
of Life.
This is where Watson and Crick come in. With
characteristic self-confidence, they ignored all the hand-wringing
over Avery's results, decided he was right, and set about showing
that DNA possessed the molecular structure suitable for the carrier
of genetic information. As everyone knows, the double helix was
triumphant vindication of their confidence in Avery's findings.
Others also found evidence to back Avery's claims
for DNA. They included Alfred Hershey at the Carnegie Institute,
New York, who used a clever radioactive labelling method to distinguish
between protein and DNA in bacteria infected by viruses. Though
much less compelling than Avery's original work or the double
helix, Hershey's findings supported those from Avery's group -
whose place in scientific history seemed assured.
At this point, however, the story of the Secret
of Life takes a bizarre turn. Despite being vindicated by the
brilliant work of Watson and Crick, the work of Avery and his
colleagues was still treated with deep scepticism by the Nobel
Committee - and by the time the quibbling stopped, Avery was dead.
Being denied a Nobel is one thing; the fact that all those who
confirmed his group's key insight - including Watson, Crick and
Hershey - won Nobels leaves no doubt about the importance of Avery's
original work.
The real scandal is the way Avery, who died
in 1955, and his colleagues are still being denied their rightful
claim to be the true discoverers of the Secret of Life by a Hollywood-style
story about two wise guys called Watson and Crick and a pretty-looking
molecule.
23 April
2003

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