Români, precursori ai geneticii moleculare

Abstract

The phenomena of heredity at a molecular level began to be discussed in 1930, following Frederick L. Griffith’s experiences in 1928 with the transformation of different types of pneumococs and those of Oswald Th. Avery, Colin M. McLeod, and Maclyin McCarty that evidenced the role which bacterial DNA played in storing genetic information. In reality, several Romanian researchers had signalled phenomena that belonged to the field of molecular genetics. Firstly, the discovery of transmissible microbial lyses (Mihai Ciuca and Jules Bordet, 1920) opened the way to understanding the complex interactions between bacteriohages and the susceptible bacterial cell. It signalled the phenomenon known as phagic transduction, which the Americans N. D. Zinder and J. Lederberg described in 1952. Ioan Cantacuzino and Olga Bonciu’s discovery in 1924 (published in Paris in 1927) about the “scarlet streptococci properties to agglutinate”. Ionescu-Mihăieşti described in 1927 for the first time in history the poliomyelitis virus recombination, a phenomenon which was later re-described and improperly named “virus sexuality” in 1955 by André Lwoff (Nobel Prize in 1965). In addition, Constantin Levaditi in Les ultravirus des maladies animals (Paris, 1943) gave some incredibly modern explanations on viral replication that use the cells' normal nucleo-proteins.