Oncogene discovery: Priority by press release
Oncogene discovery: Priority by press release
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癌基因发现：新闻稿优先
作者：
P. Newmark
癌症刺戳在路上。这是在《自然》杂志（7月7日，第35页）和《科学》杂志（7月15日，第275页）上同时发表的一篇独立发现之前，出现的最极端的标题。这篇文章独立发现了猴子肿瘤病毒的致癌基因与人类血小板产生的促生长物质基因之间的联系。由于美国新闻界首先报道的是相当准确和合理的新闻，英国新闻报道中的沙文主义和对不完美新闻稿的盲目崇拜主要反映了报纸的运作方式。当时的情况是这样的。5月初，位于伦敦的帝国癌症研究基金会（ICRF）实验室的迈克尔·沃特菲尔德博士向位于圣地亚哥的加州大学的拉塞尔·杜利特尔博士询问他的蛋白质结构计算机化数据库。杜利特尔愿意寄一盘磁带，因为这是他的政策，使他的数据库提供给任何学术科学家。沃特菲尔德希望数据库能将其蛋白质结构与血小板衍生生长因子（PDGF）的部分结构进行比较，PDGF的部分结构即将从他的实验室与圣刘易斯华盛顿大学医学院的托马斯德厄尔博士的团队和瑞典乌普萨拉大学的本特韦斯特马克博士的团队的合作中出现。为了协助搜索，沃特菲尔德还向位于马里兰州贝塞斯达的美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）的威尔伯（WJ Wilbur）和大卫·利普曼（David Lipman）请教了他们的快速搜索程序;他们还主动提供了自己的数据库。正是从5月10日的数据库中，沃特菲尔德得到了一个惊人的消息，PDGF和猿肉瘤病毒癌基因编码的蛋白质之间存在着密切的同一性，其结构已经在美国国立卫生研究院的斯图尔特·阿伦森博士的实验室中建立起来。(For对于那些喜欢巧合的人来说，威尔伯和利普曼的论文紧随其后，阿伦森的论文发表在2月号的《美国科学院院刊》上。
CANCER JAB ON THE WAY. This was the most extreme headline to emerge from the blaze of publicity preceding the simultaneous publication in Nature (7 July, p. 35) and Science (15 July, p. 275) last week of independent discoveries of the link between the oncogene of a tumour virus of monkeys and the human gene for a growth-promoting substance produced by blood platelets. Since reasonably accurate and sensible stories in the American press came first, the chauvinism and slavish devotion to an imperfect press release that characterized the British news stories are mainly a reflection of how newspapers operate. The circumstances were these. Early in May, Dr Michael Waterfield of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) laboratories in London asked Dr Russell Doolittle of the University of California at San Diego for his computerized data base of protein structures. Doolittle willingly sent a tape as it is his policy to make his data base available to any academic scientist. Waterfield wanted the data base to compare its protein structures with the partial structure of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) about to emerge from his laboratory's collaboration with Dr Thomas Deuel's group at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, and Dr Bengt Westermark's team at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. To assist in the search, Waterfield had also asked WJ Wilbur and David Lipman of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, for their rapid search programs; they also provided, unasked, a data base in their own hands. It was from that data base on 10 May that Waterfield received the astonishing news of the close identity between PDGF and the protein encoded by the simian sarcoma virus cancer gene, the structure of which had been established in Dr Stuart Aaronson's laboratory at NIH.(For those who like coincidences, Wilbur and Lipman's paper was directly followed by Aaronson's in the February issue of Proceedings of the