As a result, Arber conducted studies and participated in symposia on how to prevent the unintentional release of a genetically altered virus into the environment.
Werner Arber was born in Gränichen, Switzerland, on June 3, 1929. Educated in the Swiss public school system, he entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1949, where he focused on the natural sciences. Arber soon became exposed to experimental research and embarked on studies to isolate and characterize the radioactive isotope of chlorine. After graduation in 1953, he entered the University of Geneva as a graduate student, received an appointment as a research assistant in a laboratory, and studied biophysics. Werner became interested in bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) through the biophysicist Jean J. Weigle's studies of variations in these viruses, which aimed to show that a specific bacteriophage will only infect a specific host. Another biophysicist, Salvador Edward Luria, showed that when phages infect a different strain of bacteria, a few survive to plate efficiently with the new host strain. Most of the phages die out, and the surviving phages are no longer capable of infecting an earlier host. The phenomenon was first called host-induced variation and is now commonly known as host-controlled restriction-modification.
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