urd

thousands tested and it was felt to be unfoitunete that it had
been svathesized by the Germans before 1959, At Yale and Wash-
ington, sub typhus was the major interest. We had worked
with it in Melbourne and we had sent the fist culture from the
New Guinea area to Washington a few months before. Within
another year chloramphenicol would be available to deal with
scrub typhus, but many servicemen had died by then and the
death of Dora Lush from a laboratory infection in our own Insti-
tute cight or nine months previously was very much in my mind.

The Allied attack on Italy was in progress at the time and
already 1 was hearing about the success of DDT in handling the
explosive typhus situation in Naples. It was a story of exactly the
type that Meyer relished and it lost nothing in the telling. The
significance of DDT for the control of malaria was also being
whispered about. K.F. told me the story of the set of ponds
chosen for controlled tests on mosquito larvae, The experimental
ponds were rapidly freed but then the larvae vanished also from
the control (untreated) ponds. The solution? DDT was so power-
ful that when ducks moved from one of the experimental ponds
to the untreated ones they carried enough DDT on their plumage
to produce a larvicidal concentration in the water!

I shall always regard the war and the immediate post-war
period as the time when the full possibilitics of control of infec-
tious disease were realized or could be clearly envisaged. But a
new epoch of biological science was also opening and I saw
something of its beginnings on that American visit.

On a number of occasions, I have spent longer or shorter times
during the suramer months at Cold Spring Harbor but I first saw
it on New Year's Eve 1943. It was a lovely winter morning when
I arrived, the inlet icebound but cracking with the tides, and
there were dozens of seagulls lining the cracks or peppered over
the ice. Bare woods, brown fields, nice houses and country lanes
made me feel that it would be pleasanter to take a long winter
walk than to talk about genes and viruses. In fact, I had an
unforgettable time with Demerec and his staff. My most vivid
recollection is of seeing for the first time how Drosophila was
handled by geneticists. J had read much of fruit-fly genetics but
had never seen the insect itself. So I was introduced to them
living in quarter-pint cream bottles with a nutrient mixture of
corn meal, molasses and yeast at the bottom-—insignificant little
flies but at that time the most highly pedigreed animals in the

AQ Charnes Patterns

Wartime Visit to America SI

world, Deinerec was at that time a Drosophila geneticist. A few
years later he moved into bacterial genetics. Signs of the move
were only just appearing, perhaps I helped it on. After lunch in
the Director’s house 1 gave an informal talk on mutation in
influenza virus--the O to D phase change—-adopting a genctic
approach. I noted at the time that geneticists were just becoming
interested in bacteria and bacteriophages. I was assured that the
concepts I was developing about influenza virus variation and
selection were sound and I came away with the distinct impres-
sion that my geneticist audience was delighted to find a micro-
biologist with a real interest in their science! What a change took
place in the next dozen years: by then, most geneticists were
bacterial geneticists!

At the Rockefeller Institute I called on O. T. Avery who, in
the words of a letter of mine to Linda: ‘has just made an
extremely exciting discovery which, put rather crudely, is nothing
less than the isolation of a pure gene in the form of desoxyri-
bonucleic acid.’ I think that must be almost the last time I ever
wrote DNA in full. Nothing since has diminished the significance
or importance of Avery’s work. Neither he nor I knew it at the
time but in retrospect the discovery that DNA could transfer
genetic information from one pneumococcus to another almost
spelt the end of one field of scholarly investigation, medical bac-
teriology, and heralded the opening of the field of molecular
biology which has dominated scholarly thought in biology ever
since. Avery was an oldish man then, beginning to live a little in
the past, and happy to relate to interested visitors how his work
with the pneumococcus had reached this climax. He told the
story well and with pride. I feel that Avery’s work was so impor-
tant a link between the old and the new that I should attempt to
describe it.

We have almost forgotten that pneumonia was once the ‘cap-
tain of the men of death’ but for the period between the two
wars the study of pneumonia and the other pneumococcal infec- ©
tions was the most active and successful area of bacteriological
research. The Rockefeller Institute was the world centre for that
research and over the whole period Avery was its guiding
spirit though he had many brilliant collaborators, Dubos and
Heidelberger among them.

The key finding was that the pneumococci could be divided
into ‘types’ in the sense that if a man or an animal became