Up from Mississippi : A memoir , livre ebook

Odile Jacob - James E. Darnell

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

172 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

How did a young native of the American South, raised in an era of racism and segregation, rise to a highly decorated position at the forefront of molecular biology research? Up from Mississippi follows the remarkable career of James Darnell, a major player in some of the discoveries that illuminated our understanding of gene expression, paving the way for medical technologies—including some COVID-19 vaccines—based on messenger RNA. Darnell relates not only the circumstances and details of these landmark findings, but also the shared curiosity and excitement that drove him and his colleagues, and continues to drive his many protégés today. From childhood and college in Mississippi to medical school in St. Louis, to Paris for a stint at the Pasteur Institute and back stateside to a series of prestigious institutions instrumental to the emergence of molecular biology as a discipline, Up from Mississippi is the story of a life spent in groundbreaking research, among colorful characters who went on to win worldwide recognition—as well as a history of science in the twentieth century. James E. Darnell is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the National Medal of Science and the Lasker Award for Medical Science. He has taught at the Rockefeller University since 1974, and done research and teaching at the National Institutes of Health, the Pasteur Institute, MIT, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Columbia University.

Sujets

Médecine

Médecine de laboratoire

Genetics

Medical

Informations

Publié par	Odile Jacob
Date de parution	25 juin 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782415000080
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The present English-language edition is published by Editions Odile Jacob.
© Odile Jacob, June 2021.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission of the publisher. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
www.odilejacob.com www.odilejacobpublishing.com
ISBN : 978-2-4150-0008-0
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo .
Forewords

August 2016
My last academic publication came out almost exactly five years ago, in August 2011. Now, two weeks short of my eighty-sixth birthday, I feel no need to rise to the challenge of one more book. But in what must be a frequent occurrence late in life, I sometimes awaken with extremely vivid memories of times, thoughts, and events from a life gone by. Very often, these stirrings seem to demand to be collected and preserved. And, as I am frequently “gently” reminded by my wife, these thoughts are worth preserving at least for my own sizeable family: three accomplished sons, eight grandchildren, and now three splendid stepchildren on the brink of having their own families. So I recall and record some of these flashbacks in the hopes that they will be of some interest and use for some or all of them.
But while I judge myself to be an adequate paterfamilias, I’ve also had deep interactions with a second “family”—some 150 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows—and close friendships with many younger faculty members, especially at Rockefeller University. Quite a few of these people have also encouraged me to write a survey of over sixty years in the life of a laboratory scientist. As they say, unless old war horses like me offer an account of the questions and problems that were central between 1960 and 2000 and how they were successfully answered, today’s students and future scientists will be the poorer for it.
Nonetheless, I strongly hesitated to embark on such an undertaking. The act of recounting one’s professional life in print often proves to be at least tinged—if not totally suffused—with self-promotion. I believe I can avoid that pitfall, but do I have the hubris to meet this challenge? We’ll see.

Spring 2018
Well, I must have thrown my 2016 caution to the wind. This effort has ended up a memoir which I hope will be useful in two spheres: the scientific and the sociopolitical.
I have included a detailed account of my mid-century upbringing in Mississippi because my social and political outlook on life has been shaped by two decades of observing punishing racial prejudice. My hope in speaking out about this atmosphere, and my escape from it, is that some young person will see it and believe that their life need not be permanently warped by intolerance.
“How lucky I was” is a frequent refrain in autobiographical writing, and I stand by my claim that luck did choose me more than once. My aunt Lillian, a guiding light, might have lived in New Orleans or Atlanta or Birmingham, but instead she lived in St. Louis, where I would discover and attend Washington University—the equal, I contend, of any other U.S. medical school with a strong science foundation.
At Washington University, I gained access to the laboratory of the great Harry Eagle thanks to some simple experiments on penicillin in medicine, just as Eagle was dropping penicillin to study the growth and biochemistry of cultured animal cells. This gave me a toehold in a vastly influential approach to cell biology and virology in the late twentieth century. In turn, studying poliovirus in cell culture in Eagle’s lab earned me entry into the high court of molecular biology. The great Salvador Luria sponsored my year with one of the intellectual giants in the history of biology, Francois Jacob, the same year mRNA in bacteria was discovered. Luria then generously welcomed this young and barely adequately educated but hard-working young Mississippian to the MIT faculty in order to search for mRNA in animal cells.
I have kept all of the above in this introduction to my life’s work, followed by the story of five decades spent fleshing out important details in the molecular cell biology of animal cells. It has been, and still is, a thrilling ride.
This is a personal story, not a comprehensive history. Much of the work of the talented laboratory collaborators who deserve mention is not discussed; my apologies to the many equally gifted scientists who spent some of their younger years in my laboratory group. I have chosen to concentrate on areas we helped open that are related to gene regulation and that are still active areas of research. Here’s hoping this book proves to be of some current and historical use.
CHAPTER 1
Growing Up in Mississippi (1930–1951)

This section aims to paint a picture of my upbringing in a small Mississippi town, from the beginning of the Great Depression to my successful escape from the racist South in 1951. My childhood was rich in friendships and a perfectly adequate if not prosperous family life for about thirteen years (followed by a difficult couple of years), happily culminating in my high school and university studies (“Ole Miss”).

Family history
Although both sides of my family had a long history in various Southern states, dating back to at least the early eighteenth century, it was not a particularly distinguished one. This was true of the majority of white farmers in the Deep South who were successful enough to establish a trail of succeeding generations. Virtually all of the earliest settlers who did succeed “owned” black slaves; this was the documented case of several of my forebears. Owners of more than twenty slaves were accorded the appellation “planter”—and the South was full of planters.
Even without rich, powerful, or famous ancestors, long family lineages were nonetheless universally thought by Southerners to confer a more respectable position in society. Nothing opened doors like “being from a fine family.”

The Darnell family
As the story goes, my grandfather Sam Darnell (ca. 1868–1934) actually detested farming and survived the last years of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth by selling off tracts of an estate about twenty miles north of Columbus, Mississippi, near a hamlet called Caledonia—now an upscale suburb. What my father inherited, as I gleaned from occasional and somewhat furtive conversation, was “worthless river-bottom land” that brought a sparse return when it was finally sold. The river in question was the Tombigbee (Indian name), which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was capable of carrying steamboat traffic—cotton being the major product—to Mobile, Alabama on the Gulf Coast.
According to possibly apocryphal legend, Sam was not an organized or profitable farmer, but he was an excellent horseman and judge of horses. For this talent, the U.S. Army hired him around 1910 to select horses as cavalry mounts. As the story goes, he was very good at this; perhaps emboldened by this success, he invested a considerable amount of his remaining fortune in establishing a harness and carriage shop in 1912 or thereabouts. He was obviously swimming upstream: Henry Ford had already sold a million Model Ts by 1915, and Sam’s carriage shop soon went broke.
My father’s older brother and only sibling, Fred Darnell, inherited what was left of the farm and the farmhouse after Sam and his wife, Lila Thomas Darnell, died in the early 1930s. Thus I never really knew them.
My visits to the farmhouse as a very young child have left only hazy recollections. I remember hard, cylindrical wax records and an Edison Victrola that had to be manually wound: FDR’s rural electrification project would not come until later in the 1930s. Behind it there was a manual water well with a bucket on a long rope, and about thirty yards from that were outdoor toilets, separated by a smokehouse. (The location didn’t prevent the smokehouse from producing excellent hams.) The kitchen in the house had a large wood-burning stove. I think my earliest visits all took place during the day, usually Sundays—again, electricity had not yet come to light up Caledonia. The Rural Electrification Act was created by executive order in 1935 and funded in 1936—contrast that with Trump in 2017—but the lights were still coming on in rural America by the beginning of World War II.

The Hopkins family
On my maternal side, both my grandmother and grandfather were born on post–Civil War farms. Ferdinand Hopkins was born in 1867 in Noxubee County, Mississippi; not far away—near Shuqualak, the early American spelling of a Choctaw Indian name later corrupted to Sugar Lock by the new “owners” of this rich agricultural territory—was the King farm, where my grandmother Eva was born in 1874. Ferdinand and Eva were married in 1892 and had the first of their eleven children in 1893. That first child died just after her first year. By the time my mother, number six, was born in 1901, Ferdinand had moved his young family to Meridian, Mississippi, where he and a partner (name unknown to me) established a contracting and building business that had become quite successful by the 1920s.
Ferdinand and Eva had a spacious two-story brick house with lots of bedrooms upstairs (figure 1), where at least the majority of their children grew up. My grandmother was born on and until her marriage lived on the King family farm. Periodic visits to Meridian were part of my early upbringing. For reasons I never fully grasped, all of my mother’s brothers and sisters considered themselves particularly sophisticated because they came from a “big” town with a seventeen-story office building. Meridian’s population in 1930 was roughly 35,000—the second largest in Mississippi.
In the summer of 1937 or 1938, wh