John Cairns (biochemist)

Hugh John Forster Cairns ( born November 21, 1922 in Oxford ) is a British physician, virologist and molecular biologist. He also published about cancer.

Cairns studied medicine at the University of Oxford (Bachelor 1943 PhD 1952) and then worked as a virologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, at the Virus Research Institute in Entebbe and at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. 1960/61, he was a visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, whose director he was from 1963 to 1968. From 1968 he was at the State University of New York. In 1970, he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, and he was director of the Mill Hill Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Oxford in 1972. In 1982 he went back to the U.S. as a professor at Harvard University (Harvard School of Public Health ). In 1991, he went into retirement.

In 1952, he discovered that the flu virus was slowly produced in contrast to bacteriophage in the host cell. In 1959 he succeeded with A. Gemmell, the first genetic map of a virus to create ( the rabbit pox virus).

In 1963 he discovered with autoradiography to E. coli bacteria, the DNA of the genome in the form of circular plasmids and that DNA replication occurs in the bacterium at a certain moving point, was later discovered that this replication even are mounted on two locations, movable and progresses in opposite directions. He also dealt with cancer research and published in 1985 an influential Scientific American article, in which he stated that chemotherapy with the exception of some rare cancers, the chances of survival in the common forms of cancer hardly improved.

In 1974 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and 1981 MacArthur Fellow.

Writings

  • Cancer: Science and Society, Freeman, San Francisco 1978, Online
  • Matters of Life and Death: Perspectives on Public Health, Molecular Biology, Cancer, and the Prospects for the Human Race, Princeton University Press 1997
  • Fight against cancer, Scientific American, January 1986
  • The historical development of mortality, Mannheim Forum 85/86
Influenza MacArthur Fellows Program James Watson Integrated Authority File
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