George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum

Beadle, Tatum, and Lederberg are best known for their ground-breaking work linking genes and biochemistry. Together they shared the 1958 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.

Beadle, born in Wahoo, Nebraska, graduated from the University of Nebraska before obtaining a doctorate in genetics from Cornell University. He began his research at the California Institute of Technology where he studied the genetics of Drosophila , or the fruit fly. He traveled briefly to Paris, France, where he worked at the Institut de biologie physico-chimique. He returned to the United States in 1936 and eventually became professor of biology at Stanford University.

While at Stanford, Beadle hired Tatum, a microbiologist and biochemist, as a research assistant. Born in Boulder, Colorado, Tatum had just completed his graduate and undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin where his father was the head of the pharmacology department. He also spent some time doing postgraduate work in the Netherlands.

Beadle was convinced from his earlier work at the California Institute of Technology that genes influence heredity by chemical means. To prove his thesis, Beadle and Tatum experimented with the fruit fly for four years with no real success. Realizing that they needed a simpler subject, Beadle turned to a red bread mold called Neurospora crassa. Unlike the fruit fly, this mold appeared able to manufacture all the nutrients it needed for survival and required only a mixture of sugar, salt, and the vitamin biotin to grow.

Beadle believed that if he could mutate one or more genes in this bread mold, he could create strains that needed an extra nutrient to grow. He would then determine which enzyme in the mutation had manufactured that nutrient because it would be missing from the normal strain. He could then prove a one-to-one correspondence between the missing enzyme and the mutated gene.

Aware of Hermann Muller's discovery that radiation causes mutations, Beadle and Tatum X-rayed their bread-mold colonies. Approximately one week later, the first mutated strains appeared. By studying the new nutritional requirements of each mutant, Beadle and Tatum confirmed their hypothesis that the formation of each individual enzyme is controlled by a single specific gene. This one gene-one enzyme theory, as it has become known, helped lay the foundations of biochemical genetics.

In 1945, Tatum moved to Yale University, where he became professor of microbiology. Beadle stayed at Stanford for another year, then became professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology. While at Yale, Tatum met Joshua Lederberg, a promising postgraduate student who had graduated from Columbia University with a degree in zoology. Born in New Jersey, Lederberg was the son of Jewish Palestinian immigrants. He had originally planned to study medicine, but once he began working with Tatum, he became fascinated by microbiology. They worked together throughout Tatum's three-year stay at Yale, and Lederberg earned his Ph.D. in microbiology under Tatum.

Applying Beadle and Tatum's x-ray techniques to the study of bacteria, Tatum and Lederberg discovered that genetic information could be passed from one bacterium to another through a form of sexual reproduction. They also discovered that viruses could transfer genetic material from one host bacteria to another, a process they termed transduction. Their work greatly increased the use of bacteria in genetic research, making it as important as the fruit fly or Neurospora.