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Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are viruses that infect bacteria. Watson began his research career by studying bacteriophages.
Bacteriophages (Phages) Quotes in The Double Helix
The The Double Helix quotes below are all either spoken by Bacteriophages (Phages) or refer to Bacteriophages (Phages). For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
Knowing he could never bring himself to learn chemistry, Luria felt the wisest course was to send me, his first serious student, to a chemist.
He had no difficulty deciding between a protein chemist and a nucleic-acid chemist. Though only about one half the mass of a bacterial virus was DNA (the other half being protein), Avery’s experiment made it smell like the essential genetic material. So working out DNA’s chemical structure might be the essential step in learning how genes duplicated. Nonetheless, in contrast to the proteins, the solid chemical facts known about DNA were meager. Only a few chemists worked with it and, except for the fact that nucleic acids were very large molecules built up from smaller building blocks, the nucleotides, there was almost nothing chemical that the geneticist could grasp at.
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Bacteriophages (Phages) Term Timeline in The Double Helix
The timeline below shows where the term Bacteriophages (Phages) appears in The Double Helix. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
Watson didn’t find Herman Kalckar very interesting, and he ended up studying bacterial viruses (or phages) with the scientist Ole Maaløe instead. He felt bad about abandoning Kalckar, but he renewed...
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Chapter 10
...scientist he first met in Naples. Actually, Wilkins appreciated Watson’s encouragement because he was “a phage person.” Unlike most physicists, biochemists, biologists, and other geneticists, Watson understood the importance of DNA.
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Chapter 17
At the conference, Watson explained Al Hershey and Martha Chase’s recent research showing that phages infect bacteria using DNA. This proved that DNA is the key genetic material. Most of...
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Chapter 19
After the conference, Watson followed other phage researchers to Royaumont Abbey near Paris, where they were assembling for a week. He also...
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Chapter 29
...The news quickly reached Linus Pauling, who responded with “genuine thrill.” In Paris, the Canadian phage biochemist Gerry Wyatt told Watson about phage DNA results that also strongly supported the double...
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