John Cairns (biochemist), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

John Cairns (biochemist)

British molecular biologist

Date of Birth: 21-Nov-1922

Place of Birth: Oxford, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 12-Nov-2018

Profession: university teacher, geneticist, molecular biologist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio


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About John Cairns (biochemist)

  • 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.
  • Cairns received his M.D.
  • from Oxford.
  • He then worked as a virologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia 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 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.
  • 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.

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