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71   Israel's Weizmann Institute
     Traces the DNA of a Virus
     The Washington Post, Saturday, November 18, 1967

     Rehovoth, Israel -- During the first day of the Six Day War,
Nasser's propaganda broadcasts to the Egyptian people boasted that
"Tel Aviv was in flames.  The Weizmann Institute has been utterly
destroyed".  This was, happily, only inflamed imagination, but it
illustrates the prestige of this privately endowed center of
scientific research.

     It is a sobering reflection that far more consequential things
are happening inside the institute's laboratories than on the stormy
political, diplomatic and propaganda fronts.  Which of the many lines
of research to discuss here is a matter of personal taste and I will
simply use one item that echoes some of my own scientific interests
in genetics.

     Dr. Ernest Winocour is a native of Glasgow who was trained in
Britain, the United States and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
For some time he has been working on the polyoma virus.

     These particles can be grown on hamster or mouse or other
species' tissue cells.  In the laboratory, the polyoma virus will
induce multiple tumors (hence the name, poly- and -oma) but only
when injected into newborn animals.  There is no evidence that
the virus induces any disease by natural transmission, or in man. 
However, it is a fascinating theoretical model for cancer biology.

     The biological origin of such viruses is obviously a subject of
great interest, and it was provocative to find chemical evidence for
some similarity between the DNA of the virus and DNA from normal cell
nuclei.  This would strongly suggest that the virus had originated 
by some mutation of a part of the normal chromosome and would be an
important step in unraveling how the virus induces tumors.

     On closer study, however, the virus particles are found to be
separable into two kinds.  About 80 per cent are typical virus
particles, are infective and show very little homology with normal
DNA.  The remaining 20 per cent are non-infective and contain a
different kind of DNA from the typical virus.

     Instead, this DNA closely resembles that of the nuclei of the
host cells.  Dr. Winocour concludes that these particles represent
an entrapment of host DNA within the enveloping "capsids" or outer
skins of the virus.  The situation is reminiscent of the phenomenon
of transduction in bacteria, whereby virus particles can carry host-
cell genetic information to new cells.

     This is the most obvious point of the story, and the
possibilities of a similar genetic transfer in mammalian cells are
being actively studied.  

     There is more to reflect upon -- how much more we have to learn 
about every virus, particularly the ones we use in mass immunization
programs, by the application of more sophisticated techniques of
physic-chemical analysis.

     Finally, how preposterous it is that the United States should
now find itself, or believe itself, to be in such financial
stringencies that it must systematically retrench its support of
international science programs.  These have an immediate and
indispensable benefit for the extension of the scientific knowledge
in which all countries share and the United States to the greatest
advantage.

     There is, furthermore, no more consistent basis of international
understanding than such a sharing of knowledge on a common standard
of critical objectivity, so rare in other spheres of human action.

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