Hugh John Forster Cairns
FRS (21 November 1922 – 12 November 2018) was a British physician and molecular biologist who made significant contributions to
molecular genetics,
cancer research, and
public health
Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the de ...
.
Career
Cairns received his M.D. from
Oxford
Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town.
The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...
. He then worked as a virologist at the
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in
Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung/ or ) is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second most-populous city in Australia, after Sydney. The city's name generally refers to a metropolitan area also known ...
and at the
Virus Research Institute at
Entebbe, Uganda. He returned to Australia to work in the School of Microbiology at the
John Curtin School of Medical Research. Cairns took a sabbatical to research at the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory between 1960 and 1961, and returned there to serve as the director from 1963 to 1968. He remained a staff member at Cold Spring Harbor until 1972, when he was appointed head of the
Mill Hill Laboratory of the
Imperial Cancer Research Fund. After leaving Mill Hill in 1980, he took up a professorship at the
Harvard School of Public Health. He retired in 1991.
In his 1963 paper "The bacterial chromosome and its manner of replication as seen by autoradiography", Cairns demonstrated by
autoradiography that the
DNA of the
bacterium ''
Escherichia coli
''Escherichia coli'' ( )Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. is a gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus '' Escherichia'' that is commonly fo ...
'' was a single molecule that is replicated at a moving locus (the replicating fork) at which both new DNA strands are being synthesized. Subsequently, it was found that there were in fact two moving forks, traveling simultaneously in opposite directions around the chromosome.
In 1974 he was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...
. In 1981, John Cairns received a
MacArthur Foundation ("genius") Fellowship. He is the author of the 1978 book ''Cancer: Science and Society'' (now out of print) and the 1997 book, ''Matters of Life and Death: Perspectives on Public Health, Molecular Biology, Cancer, and the Prospects for the Human Race''. Together with
James Watson and
Gunther Stent, Cairns also edited the collection of historical accounts ''Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology'' (1st edition, 1966; 2nd edition, 1992; 3rd edition, 2007).
See also
*
Theta structure
*
Adaptive mutation
References
External links
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Oral History Collection, John Cairns
A description of the 1963 paper
2002 paper on Immortal DNA strand hypothesis (theory)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cairns, John
1922 births
2018 deaths
Harvard University staff
British molecular biologists
British geneticists
Fellows of the Royal Society
MacArthur Fellows
WEHI alumni
British expatriates in Australia
British expatriates in Uganda
Alumni of the University of Oxford