SUPPLEMENT VI 



GENES AND CHEMICAL REACTIONS IN NEUROSPORA 



by 



George W. Beadle. 



Pasadena, California, California Institute of Technology. 



Nobel Lecture, December n, 1958. 



On this occasion of sharing the high honor of a Nobel Award with Edward 

 L. Tatum for our ". . . discovery that genes act by regulating chemical events", 

 and with Joshua Lederberg for his related ". . . discoveries concerning the 

 organization of the genetic material of bacteria", it seems appropriate that I 

 sketch briefly the background events that led to the work on Neurospora 

 that" Tatum and I initiated in 1940. I shall leave to my co-recipients of the 

 Award the task of describing in detail the developments in Neurospora that 

 followed our first success, and the relation of this to the rise of bacterial genetics, 

 which has depended largely on studies of genetic recombination following con- 

 jugation and transduction. 



I shall make no attempt to review the entire history of biochemical genetics, 

 for this has been done elsewhere (2, 13, 22, 23). 



Anthocyanins and Alcaptonuria. 



Soon after de Vries, Correns and Tschermak "rediscovered" Mendel's 

 1865 paper and appreciated its full significance, investigators in the exciting 

 new field, which was to be called genetics, naturally speculated about the 

 physical nature of the "elements" of Mendel and the manner of their action. 

 Renamed genes, these units of inheritance were soon found to be carried 

 in the chromosomes. 



One line of investigation that was destined to reveal much about what 

 genes do was started by Wheldale (later Onslow) in 1903. It began with 

 a genetic study of flower pigmentation in snapdragons. But soon the genetic 

 observations began to be correlated with the chemistry of the anthocyanin 

 and related pigments that were responsible. The material was favorable for 



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