A Nuclear Tyrosine Kinase Becomes a Cytoplasmic Oncogene

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to be here at this celebration. My whole scientific career has, of course, been shaped by the discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA. At that time I was in high school, and hardly aware of it. But I do remember an incident in the late 1950s when, as a college student, I had the rare opportunity to drive Jim Watson from Cold Spring Harbor to a nearby airport on Long Island. At that time he said to me “There’s a virus that’s just been discovered that has only a small amount of DNA in it.” It had to be SV40 or polyoma virus. “That such a virus is able to cause cancer means that a very small amount of genetic information is all that’s required to cause cancer and we should be able to decipher that very quickly,” he observed. Well, as usual, his insight was remarkable, because those viruses have played a central role in developing the notions of oncogenes; his time line, however, was a little short.