Two broken links....

The year was 1995.  I had just joined a Master's program in Botany at an institution of higher learning in India.  It was my first time away from home.  So there were mixed feelings about the whole thing.

Slowly as the school work proceeded, I started spending some of my free time in the university library, the biggest one I had ever seen.  Even in those days, for a university that small, the library was actually quite nice.  It had a wide collection of books and it subscribed to a lot of internationally published scientific journals.  I got my first real taste of what scientific research is like, when going through these journals.

I was still very much a beginner and really didn't understand much of what I read in those articles.  But there was one journal which I grew fond of very quickly.  It was the journal "Genetics" published by the Genetics Society of America.  This journal publishes, at the beginning of every issue, a series called "Perspectives" which are commentaries from a historical point of view on a variety of topics and on historical figures.

The first perspective that caught my attention was written by Norman Horowitz and was titled "Sixtieth Anniversary of Biochemical Genetics".  We had just learned about the one gene one enzyme hypothesis and the really clever experimental methods that deciphered it in Neurospora crassa in one of our courses.  On the backdrop of that story, this article influenced me a lot.  I was fascinated with the methods, results and interpretation thereof by Beadle and Tatum in their landmark research.  I believe this inspiration is what has brought me where I am today and it will continue to guide me in the coming future.

I was so excited about this whole thing that I wanted to talk to these guys to find out more from them.  Sadly, both of them passed away a long time ago, Tatum in 1975 and Beadle in 1989.  There were two remaining links though: Joshua Lederberg, the third recipient of the 1958 Nobel Prize alongwith Beadle and Tatum, and Norman Horowitz who was Beadle's postdoc and had done preliminary and groundbreaking work that eventually led to Beadle's one gene one enzyme hypothesis.

I jumped right on it.  Email was still very new and not very easily accessible, so I contacted both of them by postal mail first to request some contemporary articles.  It is hard to describe in words the joy I felt when I shortly thereafter heard from both of them.   Lederberg had sent me papers from his landmark work on conjugation in bacteria and Horowitz sent me a reprint of the perspective article he had written and a few more of his reprints alongwith a PNAS article.  I voraciously read through all of them.

I stayed in contact with them until I believe 2001.  Later I lost touch with Lederberg.  After I moved to the United States in early 2004, I had gotten in touch with Horowitz again to request a quote from his Protein Science article which he sent right away.  That was my last contact with him.

Last Saturday, I was completing an assignment for this Genetics class I am taking and came up on an article that talked about Horowitz's research.  There was a bracket after Horowitz name which enclosed two years 1915 and 2005.  For a moment, I could not believe my eyes.  It was true, Horowitz had passed away and I wasn't even aware of it.  My link to the landmark research and to Beadle/Tatum had broken, never to be repaired.

Sadly, there was more in store for me.  This morning, after reading through Nobel Prize announcements, I read the report on the New York Times.  At the end of the article, there was a link to an article written on February 5, 2008 that was titled: Joshua Lederberg passes away.  It is hard to describe how I feel about this.   Sad, nostalgic and this uneasiness that comes after losing something precious.

Of course these individuals, as my inpirers, have been immortalized for me and for the world and they will continue to inspire until....well, let's just leave it at that.

I will end this blog with a quote from Norman Horowitz that I think is really beautiful:

"The older I get, the more I appreciate the difference between the results of scientific investigations and the methods by which the results are obtained. The results constitute the body of scientific knowledge- they are science. But, as has been noted by others, the facts of science exist in nature and are waiting to be discovered; if not found by one investigator, they will be found by another. The methods, however, are the creations of individual scientists; they are more art than science. For this reason, and depending on one's mood, they may be even more admirable than the science they make possible. The history of biochemical genetics provides many examples, large and small, of art and science." 

--Norman Horowitz.  Protein Science 1995.