This Just Read: The Transforming Principle

I've been doing some book penance this week, and enjoying it, too! I've just finished Maclyn McCarty's The Transforming Principle: Discovering that Genes Are Made of DNA. I got this book when it was first published in 1985 and I've been carrying it around ever since. It was assigned reading for a biology preceptorial at St. John's College led by Barbara Leonard back in 1985 or '86.

Confession: I didn't read it then. I just read it now.

Overall it's a good read. Written by one of the three principle biochemists working on the puzzle of the "transforming principle" in the 1930s and '40s. Researchers discovered that cells of pneumococcus (the bacteria that cause pneumonia) could be transformed from one strain to another by the introduction of a small amount of cells of the new strain "killed" by heat or chemical action. The resultant cells are of the new type and reproduce true to that type. They are, quite literally, remade as something else.

Nobody knew how it happened or what agents were responsible. Over years of painstaking lab work Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty carefully isolated the factors and deduced that DNA--something that had been discovered fifty years earlier but nobody thought very much about--must be the sole agent of transformation.

The book was written by McCarty in the 1980s, after Oswald and MacLeod had died. McCarty combed through lab notes and correspondence (and his own memory) to piece together the story. It's a great account of the real work of science: methodical, ordered, occasionally requiring intuitive leaps.

I love book and movies about creativity and discovery. I love the "Aha!" moment when all the pieces fall into place. I enjoy it in books about science, art, mystery, any human endeavor that requires innovative thinking. Favorites of mine along these lines include Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, the movie Enigma, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Watson's The Double Helix, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, John Barry's The Great Influenza, and so on.

It took James Watson and Francis Crick in the 1950s to take the next step in DNA research, which Oswald, McCarty, and McCarty hint at in the 1940s:

It remains one of the challenging problems for future research to determine what sort of configurational or structural differences can be demonstrated between desoxyribonucleates of separate specificities.

This would be the work of Crick and Watson, who moved from pure biochemistry to spectography to unlock the secrets of the double helix (read The Double Helix for the account of this discovery. I did read that one, Ms. Leonard).

So, after almost thirty years I've finished my reading for that preceptorial. Whew!