MUTAGENESIS, WITH PARTICULAR 

 REFERENCE TO CHEMICAL FACTORS 



CHARLOTTE AUERBACH 



Institute of Animal Genetics 



The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland 



I want to say a few words about the summary which I sent out, be- 

 cause you may have thought it a bit carping or too negative. One 

 reason I wrote it like that was that I was asked to be challenging, so 

 I thought I would make it challenging. But there are two other reasons. 

 One is that, having now really gone into mutation work with micro- 

 organisms, I am puzzled by quite a lot of difficulties which do not seem 

 to have found much attention in the past, and I hope we will get 

 them discussed here. Secondly, I believe that the work on phage trans- 

 forming principle, bacteriophage, and tobacco mosaic virus has been 

 so beautiful and so fascinating in the light it throws on the nature of 

 the genetic material that there is a danger that the biologists will turn 

 over their results to people with chemical training and forget that the 

 genetic material, after all, sits in the cell and that lots of things happen 

 in the cell which would not happen to anything in vitro. It is implicit in 

 much work — the assumption which, to me, sounds naive from a biolog- 

 ical point of view, that if you put a chemical into a cell, it makes 

 straight for the DNA and reacts with it, and whatever else happens 

 is a rather negligible and deplorable accident, which one should put 

 out of the way. 



I have arranged what I wanted to say under a number of headings. 

 I can already see from the previous volume that I won't have very 

 much time to speak uninterruptedly, but I welcome this very much. 

 However, I thought I would give myself a chance of talking about 

 this for about five minutes, by doing something very uncontroversial; 

 that is, by quickly running over the history of chemical mutagenesis. 



We can ask ourselves one question here; that is, how important is 

 a good theory of the genetic material for finding a good mutagen? The 

 first principle, and one which is still used very much for the testing 



