McArdle Cancer Symposium Honors Howard Temin

Two Nobel Laureates came to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in June 2009 to participate in the second annual McArdle Symposium on Cancer, which this year honored Howard M. Temin, PhD, also a Nobel Laureate.

 

Harold Varmus, MD, currently president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for his discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Harald zur Hausen, DSc, MD, of the German Cancer Research Center, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008 for discovering the role of human papilloma viruses in cervical cancer.

 

This year's symposium commem-orated the 75th anniversary year of Temin's birth and was a tribute to his life, work and legacy.

 

"Howard was a dedicated researcher, teacher and mentor," says tumor virologist Bill Sugden, PhD, professor of oncology at McArdle, who was a close colleague of Temin's until his death in 1994. "He was an inspiring intellect both to his students and to his many friends fortunate enough to know him during his 34 years at McArdle."

 

Howard Temin won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975.

Nearly 300 people attended the symposium, which featured a wide range of fundamental and clinical topics in cancer. It concluded with a dinner and evening program at the Memorial Union Great Hall, where many colleagues and speakers paid tribute to Temin, including his widow, Rayla Temin, PhD, an emeritus adjunct professor of genetics.

 

Temin received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked in the laboratory of virologist Renato Dulbecco, PhD. Most people at the time were studying influenza and polio viruses, but Temin chose to study Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), a cancer-causing virus with RNA rather than DNA as its main genetic material.

 

After a brief postdoctoral period, Temin joined the School of Medicine and Public Health faculty in 1960. Studying the RSV life cycle with his team, he proposed that although the virus contained RNA, it maintained itself inside infected cells as a DNA "provirus." This hypothesis overturned the "central dogma" of one-way information flow from DNA to RNA, and so it was highly controversial and met with disdain.

 

Nevertheless, Temin continued to provide experimental support for his provirus hypothesis. His team ultimately demonstrated that proviral DNA was synthesized by a reverse transcriptase carried inside the infectious RSV particles. Almost simultaneously, David Baltimore, MD, demonstrated an equivalent activity in a murine leukemia virus. The general importance of their results was immediately recognized and in 1975 Temin, Baltimore and Dulbecco together were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

 

Temin and his students pursued their studies of the basic problems of retroviral replication for the next 19 years. During that time, Temin was well-known as a dedicated classroom teacher.

 

Tumor virology continues to be a dynamic area of research at the School of Medicine and Public Health, says Paul Ahlquist, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at McArdle who was an organizer of the symposium.

 

"The tumor virology group at McArdle is widely recognized for its strength, and forms a core of an even larger, campus-wide Human Cancer Virology Program within the UW Carbone Cancer Center," he says.

The symposium was sponsored by the McArdle Laboratory, the Carbone Cancer Center and the Morgridge Institute.

 

By Dian Land

This article appears in the fall 2009 issue of Quarterly.

Date Published: 11/11/2009