TWiV 904: 50 years of reverse transcriptase

This Week in Virology

Vincent Racaniello

Vincent, Microbe, Medicine, Microbiology, Racaniello, Infection, Virus, Virology, Pathogen, Infectious, Twiv, Science & Medicine

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vincent travels to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to speak with David Baltimore, John Coffin, and Harold Varmus about the discovery in 1970 of retroviral reverse transcriptase and its impact on life sciences research. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello Guests: David Baltimore, John Coffin, and Harold Varmus Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email Become a patron of TWiV! Links for this episode Fifty Years of Reverse Transcriptase (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) 50th Anniversary of RT discovery (Mol Biol Cell) RT in virions of Rous sarcoma virus – Temin (Nature) RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in tumor virus particles – Baltimore (Nature) Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees Send your virology questions and comments to [email protected]

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week in virology, the podcast about viruses, the kind that make you sick.
0:10.4	From micro TV, this is TWIV, this week in virology. This is a special episode recorded
0:18.6	on April 21st, 2022. I'm Vincent Racken-Ello and you're listening to the podcast all about viruses.
0:27.2	Today we're recording at 50 years of reverse transcriptase. This is a meeting being held at
0:33.9	cold spring harbor laboratory. So two groups independently discovered that enzyme in 1970, 52 years ago.
0:45.7	And we've gathered three individuals to chat about that tonight at this meeting. And we're lucky to
0:51.6	have one of the discoverers here from Pasadena, California. David Baltimore, welcome. Hello.
0:58.2	David was previously on TWIV 100, which was a long time ago. In fact, everybody here tonight has
1:04.7	been on an episode of TWIV. Next to David from Boston, Massachusetts, John Kaufan. Welcome back.
1:11.5	Hello everybody. This is John's third TWIV. How about that? And at the end of the
1:18.1	table from New York, Harold Varmas. Welcome back. Thank you, Vincent. Harold was on number 400.
1:24.7	And this is going to be 890 something probably. So we're approaching episode a thousand. So I
1:31.4	wanted to start with you, David, and transport yourself back to the 60s and 70s. And give us a
1:40.6	sense of how the work you were doing at the time led to the experiments to reveal reverse
1:50.0	transcriptase. Well, if I go back to that time, what I was concerned about was how RNA viruses
2:01.6	run their business. What is the genetic system within which RNA viruses live?
2:08.4	And I had been working on that kind of issue ever since I started as graduate student in 1960.
2:17.8	And this was now 1970. And we had put in place much of what we wanted to know about how RNA
2:30.8	viruses work. But there was one group of viruses that didn't fit. And that was the RNA tumor
2:41.3	viruses, a group of RNA viruses that caused cancer. And Howard, Howard Temen had 10 years before that
2:51.7	suggested that they had to put their information in something more permanent than RNA. Because RNA
3:05.7	degraded very easily. And that had to be DNA. But that violated the central dogma, which said that
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