Maclyn McCarty

Maclyn McCarty ( born June 9, 1911 in South Bend, Indiana; † January 2, 2005 in New York City ) was an American biologist.

He studied biochemistry at Stanford University ( completion 1933) and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where in 1937 his MD Made statements and after that completed a three-year residency training in pediatrics. In 1941 he went to Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller University (then called the Rockefeller Institute and Hospital) in New York, where he remained for nearly 60 years.

With Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod he showed in 1944 that the genetic transformation in pneumococci by DNA and not by proteins is effected. This was an important step towards the realization that the DNA and not, as was believed until then, proteins are the carriers of genetic information. This realization sat down by not immediately and was only generally accepted with the breakthrough of James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, where they were influenced by the work of Avery, McLeod and McCarty. But it does not explicitly cited, what McCarty was not very pleased and this also expressed in a Nature article on the 50th anniversary of the work of Watson and Crick. Avery, McLeod and McCarty had been proposed several times for the Nobel Prize, but none of them won it.

The reason for this investigation were research on pneumococci ( the gene that coded for components of the bacterial wall and the transition from non-virulent R form to S- form virulent bacteria brought about with smooth wall ), and infectious diseases were his main area. From 1946 he headed the Laboratory of Bacteriology and Immunology of Homer Swift, who went to Rockefeller University to retire, streptococci and their causation of rheumatic fever, the McCarty intensively explored in the following decades. There was also Rebecca Lancefield their Lancefield classification of streptococci. McCarty examined with employees the exact structure of the bacterial wall and discovered that the bacteria produced enzymes, the DNA disassembled ( deoxyribonucleases ).

McCarty was later vice president of Rockefeller University and a senior physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital ( Physician -in-Chief ). He was also Head of the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York City.

In 1981, he received the Robert Koch Medal, 1988, the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal and in 1994 he received the Lasker- Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science.

He was about forty years editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.