The advent of the mRNA vaccine is like a big science popularization of molecular virology, so that many people with no medical background open retroviruses and closed their mouths to reverse transcriptases, but unfortunately their knowledge comes from those online articles that are not justified, and the knowledge and understanding of the editor are very problematic, which makes a large proportion of Chinese people fall into the thinking mode of conspiracy theory.
Without pointless arguments, let's tell the story of the discovery of retroviruses.
The story begins more than a hundred years ago.
1.
One day in 1909, a farmer on Long Island, New York, clutched a hen and came to the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine in upper Manhattan.
As can be seen from the name, the Rockefeller Institute was funded by the then rich Rockefeller family and established in 1901, which was the first biomedical research institute in the United States, with reference to the French Pasteur Institute established in 1888 and the Robert Koch Institute in Germany established in 1891, which became the center of american medical research after its establishment.
Medical research in the United States began with William Welch, one of the four masters of johns Hopkins University, after Welch obtained a doctorate in medicine from Columbia University in 1875, went to Germany for two years of further study, studied under Koch and many other masters, returned to the United States and established a laboratory at New York University School of Medicine, became the first professor of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1884, and later became the first dean of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and founded the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Within two years of Johns Hopkins University, Welch had 16 disciples, who were known as the first generation of American medical research talents, and Welch became the founding father of American medical research.
The first director of the Rockefeller Institute was Welch's disciple, Simon Flexner.
The farmer walked around the Rockefeller Institute with his hen in his arms, empty and didn't see a single person, only to realize that it was the weekend and that the scientists were also resting. The farmer was not willing to run in vain, knocking on the door one by one, and it was hard to open a laboratory door, which was opened by a man who had just entered middle age.
This man was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where Johns Hopkins University is located, so he was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where he studied at Johns Hopkins University, and came to the Rockefeller Institute to do medical research after graduation.
Rouse gave up the weekend to do experiments in the laboratory, and when he saw a farmer holding a chicken, he quickly explained that this was a medical research institute and that he was selling agricultural products to the farmer's market.
The farmer took off his hat and saluted, pointed to a lump on the right breast of the hen, said that the hen at home had a big lump, he was afraid that the infectious disease would affect other chickens, and went to the local agricultural bureau for help, the agricultural bureau did not know what was going on, and suggested that he come here for help.
Rouse thought that the agricultural bureau was also confused enough, and we were not veterinarians, but looking at the farmer's sincere face, he really couldn't open his mouth and refuse, so he invited the farmer into the house.
The farmer carried the hen into a laboratory full of experimental instruments and equipment, just like Grandma Liu entered the Grand View Garden, and the two eyeballs were not enough.
Rouse cleaned up the test bench and asked the farmer to put the hen on the test bench and start examining the hen.
By this time, the farmer had long forgotten the fear that the rest of the chickens in the family had the same disease, and watched the scientist examine his chicken carefully, and suddenly felt that his chicken might make a great contribution to medical research.
"Sir, what is the disease of my chicken?"
Rouse turned a deaf ear and concentrated on examining the chickens.
After a while, Rouse looked up and told the farmer what the disease of your chicken was, and he had to study it carefully.
The farmer realized that science was not as simple as he thought, and agreed that Rouse would operate on the chicken and cut the lump.
Rouse thought for a moment, thinking that he did not have the skills of a veterinarian, and told the farmer that if he cut off the lump, he would first cut off the chicken head.
The farmer felt that there was no need to go back with a chicken without a head, so he said goodbye with some regret and left.
It disappeared into history without even leaving a name.
2.
Sending the farmer away, Rouse took out a knife, cut off the neck of the chicken, and then put the dead chicken in place, disinfected it, and opened the chest to remove the lump.
After removing the lump, Rouse first cut a piece for pathology and found that it was a malignant sarcoma.
At that time, the understanding of the tumor was still very superficial, and Rouse's thinking was influenced by the farmer's concerns, and he also felt that this malignant tumor could be passed from one chicken to another. Therefore, the problem of whether it will be contagious should be solved first.
Rouse managed to find the same type of hen, cut the tumor off, transplant it into the hen, and a few days later was thrilled to find that the hen also had a sarcoma.
Next, Rouse hopes to find the source of infection, and since it can be transmitted, there must be some kind of microorganism. He filtered out the tumor cells and found that they could still be contagious. Then use a membrane to filter out the bacteria, and it is found that it can still be transmitted. Therefore, he believes that the source of infection is the virus.
At this time, virology is still in its infancy, because the electron microscope has not yet appeared, can not see the virus, can only take the exclusion method, according to the characteristics of the virus is smaller than the bacteria, rely on the method of filtering, the bacteria are filtered out, if it is still infectious, it is considered that there is a virus. In addition, the parasitic nature of the virus was not determined at that time, but it was believed that the virus, like bacteria, had the ability to survive on its own.
Rouse successfully passed on sarcoma in hens for several generations, becoming the first to demonstrate that the virus can cause malignancy. In 1911 he published the results in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the official journal of the Rockefeller Institute.
Unfortunately, Rouse's discovery is too advanced, at that time the medical community was more unanimous that tumors were caused by environmental factors, and for his discovery, peers believed that either he did not filter the tumor cells cleanly, or the tumors that grew out were not tumors at all, plus Rouss was a newcomer in this field, and no one repeated his experiments at all, which made Rouse disheartened and left the field of cancer research.
With the rise of virology, Rouse's research began to be valued, and he was recommended for the Nobel Prize since 1926, but the value of this research has not been valued. After the invention of electron microscopy in the 1940s, the virus discovered by Rouse, the Rouse sarcoma virus (RSV), was confirmed under electron microscopy, and Rouse's article was re-published in the inaugural issue of the journal Virology in 1955.
In 1961, RSV was identified as an RNA virus.
In 1966, 55 years later, Rouse shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, and he was 87 years old, the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine to date.
Rouse won the Nobel Prize by living long, and RSV is the darling of the Nobel Prize, and Rouse is not the only person who won the Nobel Prize on RSV.
3.
After graduating from college in 1955, Howard Temin came to California from Pennsylvania to become a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, Renato Dulbecco, majoring in embryology, and a year and a half later, His interests changed to majoring in animal virology. The research direction of Durbeko's laboratory is animal tumor viruses, so that Termin is exposed to RSV, and in the study, it was observed that there is a close relationship between RSV and the genome of the cells infected by it.
In 1959, after receiving his doctorate, Tesmin continued to do postdoctoral work in The Durbeco Laboratory. In 1960, Termin returned to the East and was employed at the McAddell Cancer Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a virologist.
It was a very unpopular field, because by this time, cancer and viruses were considered unrelated, and not only that, but when Tesmin arrived at Madison, he found that the laboratory assigned to him was located in the basement of a building that looked like it was collapsing, and it was empty, and his office looked like a closet. Temmin had to borrow a friend's laboratory at the University of Illinois to continue RSV research, and then settle down in Madison when the lab was ready.
Tedmin studied RSV one by one, and soon faced the problem, is the RNA virus, not the DNA virus, other tumor viruses are also RNA viruses, at that time the mainstream of the scientific community believed that DNA to RNA, and then to proteins, so how is the RSV virus copied?
Temmin proposed the concept of "provirus", he used the antibiotic actinomycin D that inhibits DNA expression, and found that the "provirus" is DNA or located in the DNA of the cell, that is, RSV has a process of turning RNA into DNA, and then synthesizing RNA, that is, reverse transcription.
Temmin is a nameless man in the virology community, and his concept of reverse transcription is naturally scorned by the academic leaders as the delusion of a small person in the frontier academy.
Durbeko, Temmen's mentor, did not treat the disciple very well, and in 1962 Durbecko left caltech to be hired by the newly established Salk Institute of Biological Sciences. Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine that year, was one of the institute's founders, and the process of DNA-to-RNA-to-protein replication is exactly what Crick insisted on.
In 1965, Dulbeko recruited an independent researcher, David Baltimore, who later proposed his own classification of the virus, at the age of 27.
4.
Baltimore is from New York, he is Jewish like Termin, and both graduated from Swarthmore College, but Bit is 5 years tomorrow night, the two people did not intersect at Swarthmore College, during the Doctorate and after graduation, Baltimore has conducted research at the Rockefeller Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, mainly in the field of poliovirus.
After coming to the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, Baltimore worked on RNA replication for the polio virus.
In 1967, Baltimore recruited a postdoctoral fellow, a year younger than him, born in Nanjing, a Chinese-American female scientist named Alice Huang, who, like Ross, was a hardcore Johns Hopkins, with bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Johns Hopkins University.
In 1968, at the invitation of Salvador Luria, who was about to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Baltimore returned to MIT as an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology, and Huang Shihou came with him to MIH, where the two married in October of that year and then became friends to this day.
At Johns Hopkins, Huang's research focused on the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) that infects horses, cattle, and pigs, a single-stranded RNA virus that allows for an understanding of viral replication. Coming to the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences, she used VSV as a research object in her Baltimore lab.
After coming to MIT, they found that the virus had RNA polymerase that relied on RNA. After that, Huang Shihou continued to study VSV, and this persistence made her miss the Nobel Prize.
Baltimore turned to two other viruses, the Roche-murine leukemia virus and the Rouse sarcoma virus (RSV).
In 1970, both Termin and Baltimore discovered retrovirtase, a discovery that completely rewrote the textbook of viral replication, which later became known as retroviruses.
The discovery of the reverse transcriptase was an undisputed Nobel-level achievement, and the rate of awarding was so fast that just five years later, in 1975, Durbeko, the mentor of Termin, Baltimore and the owner of the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences in Salk, shared that year's Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Huang Shihou brushed past the Nobel Prize because he was too fond of VSV.
When he won the Nobel Prize, Baltimore was only 37 years old, and Termin was only 40 years old, which was the age of prosperity.
And the history of Ross's virus is not yet finished.
In 1979, Harold Varmus and Michael Bishop discovered the first retroviral oncogene while studying RSV, and for that reason shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1989.
In this way, a sick chicken in 1909 spawned three Nobel Prizes.
The farmer who walked into the Rockefeller Institute with his sick chicken in his family did not expect to die that he would make such a great contribution to modern medicine.