1993: DNA & Chromosomes, Vol. LVIII
Organizer: Bruce Stillman, Bruce Alberts
1993 was a great year. It could hardly
be otherwise, marking the 40th anniversary of the DNA double helix,
and the Symposium was a great celebration of science and the joys
of doing science. The opening evening began with celebratory talks
by Francois Jacob and Sydney Brenner, two whose names reappear
again and again in the Symposia volumes during the golden age
of molecular genetics. And to honor his 65th birthday and his
new position as President of the Laboratory, Jim Watson was presented
with a 15-foot high bronze model of the double helix, crafted
by Charles Reina, a local sculptor. It stands in the lobby of
Grace Auditorium, a fitting reminder of Jim’s great contributions
to science.
The theme of the 1993 Symposium–DNA
and Chromosomes–goes back 52 years to the Symposium on Genes
and Chromosomes: Structure and Organization, although in 1941
DNA hardly was mentioned. Then, before Avery, Macleod and McCarty,
it was thought of, if at all, as a structural component of chromosomes
and nothing to do with their role in heredity. Hal Weintraub noted
in his masterly closing remarks that while most meetings provide
a perspective on a field from year to year, the Symposia give
an opportunity to look over decades. (Tragically, Hal died just
two years later.) He did not go back to 1941 but did begin his
discussion with references to the summary by Francois Jacob and
Jacques Monod in the 1962 Symposium and to their ideas on regulatory
circuits. Now we have a panoply of regulatory elements at the
DNA level, combined with regulation at the chromatin level through
nucleosomes and histones. Another major theme of the 1993 meeting
was on DNA-binding proteins, now being analyses at the
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atomic
level by X-ray crystallography.
An historical highlight of the meeting
was Jacob’s discussion of the origin of the “replicon.”
He told of the Brenner and Jacob families sitting on the beach
at La Tranche-sur-Mer; or, rather, Francois and Sydney sat on
the beach amidst a maelstrom of eight children, four from each
family. “Little by little, talking and drawing with a finger
in the sand”, they devised the replicon model.
The genome projects were just a few
years old but the first interesting data were coming out on the
benefits of large-scale sequence. Lee Hood, for example, described
their detailed analysis of several hundred kilobases of sequence
from the human and mouse T-cell-receptor loci. But the most impressive
numbers came from Bob Waterston and the C. elegans genome project.
Here more than 2 Mb had been sequenced–a huge amount for
1993–in two greater than 1 Mb contigs, separated by only
a few gaps. Weintraub was impressed by the quality of the genome
work, remarking that some of the “...unexpected benefits
that the proponents predicted” were already apparent.
— Jan A. Witkowski |
