Mutation carriers: US laboratories led by Spaniards in the early 80s

• Autores: Enrique Wulff Barreiro, Emilia Currás Puente
• Localización: The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 / coord. por Antoni M. Roca Rosell, 2012, ISBN 978-84-9965-108-8, págs. 830-837
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The history of the initial protocols to transfer viral genetic products inducing tumors was greatly facilitated by the availability of continuous cell line of highly contact-inhibited cells (NIH/3T3). During the 70s the teachings of those involved in this research reached some of the Spanish biologists recently arrived in the US. And in the early 80s a significant group of Spanish oncologists developed laborious techniques for the detection of oncogenes, involving the gene cloning of regions where there are aberrations, sequencing and identification of structural genes in the affected loci, and then determination of their role in cancer. Pellicer worked from 1976 to 1980 in cell proliferation and cancer at the Columbia University’s Medical Center, College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1979, Manuel Perucho went to a Gordon Conference on Immunology in New York. Ángel Pellicer communicated him his transfection results. This was why Perucho moved away from Berlin Max Planck Institut für Molekulare Genetik to the US CSHL, and later to Stony Brook. Also in 1979, Mariano Barbacid, from the Laboratory of RNA Tumor Viruses, NCI, Bethesda, went to New York, where Ángel Pellicer communicated him his transfection results. These three molecular oncology research leaders met with oncogenes. After the initial observation that a significant proportion of the tumors scored positive in the fibroblasts used –the NIH 3T3 cells– and that the genes responsible belonged to the ras family, Ángel Pellicer isolated the two main murine genes responsible for the phenotype, N-ras, in results presented in 1984. The following year he sequenced the complete coding region of N-ras, and suggested evidence for the spectrum of activated mutations in different mouse strains and by different agents. A number of methodical factors affect this historical series of performances. Concept symbols derived from the display of the graphical distribution along time of the concurrent performances reveal the successive shifts of their authors from the Columbia University to the Cold Spring Harbor Lab and the Frederick Cancer Research Center.