The bacteria were first grown in medium with heavy isotopes, infected, then grown in medium with light isotopes. These historic mRNA experiments happened in a lab next to his, says Caltech RNA biologist Mitch Guttman, and “the whole crew came out to Caltech to use Meselson’s techniques to explore the elusive ‘transient’ intermediate.” The experiments included infection of Escherichia coli with a bacteriophage, which switched off bacterial protein synthesis and turned on phage protein production. Delihas remembers the excitement about this finding. It was the molecule that moves information from DNA in the nucleus to the protein-making machinery in the cytoplasm. This was also the year Sydney Brenner, François Jacob and Matthew Meselson published about an “intermediate information carrier” they called messenger RNA 2. It holds ribosomal proteins together and acts as ribosome scaffolding. At the time, many researchers “thought RNA does not do much of anything,” he says. The conversation with Bendich took place sometime in 1961, says Delihas. “I owe my research career to him,” says Delihas. Delihas respected Bendich as an out-of-the box thinker and took the mentor’s words to heart. Delihas, now an RNA molecular biologist at Stony Brook University, was a postdoctoral fellow whom Bendich mentored. “Nick, why don’t you earn an honest living and work on RNA?” is what Nicholas Delihas recalls hearing from Aaron Bendich, who led a nucleoside lab at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.
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