Endurance of life : the implications of genetics for human life / Macfarlane Burnet.

  • Frank Macfarlane Burnet
Date:
1978
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Endurance of life : the implications of genetics for human life / Macfarlane Burnet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    45/248 page 35
    3 A Personal Approach 35 thereby in my opinion destroying most of their usefulness. DNA repair was unknown in 1957-8, when I had my earlier official associations with radiation dangers, and I now read all I could find about it. In the process I had also to become reasonably up to date in regard to what was known about mutation. Mutation research first became important when Muller in 1927 found that fruit ñies exposed to X-rays developed increased num¬ bers of the rare inheritable abnormalities that appear spontaneously in plants and animals and that had been known as mutations for at least twenty years previously. By 1973 many chemical agents were known that were highly eifective in producing mutations, and few people doubted that such chemical mutagens acted very similarly to and were perhaps identical with the cancer-producing substances we call chemical carcinogens. My interest in radiation, mutation, and DNA damage and repair lasted long after the committee had sent in its report, been thanked by the Prime Minister, and disbanded. All through, one particular facet had interested me: that the spontaneous appearance of cancers and leukaemias or of genetic abnormalities in human populations was very much greater, sometimes a thousand times greater, than could be accounted for by any mutagenic radiation present in the environment. Nor did it seem even conceivable that the result could be due to unsuspected chemical mutagens taken in with air, water, or food. Evidently mutations affecting the whole body—germ-line mutations arising in the reproductive cells and giving rise to in¬ herited abnormalities—usually arose spontaneously. This held too for the leukaemias that for good practical reasons are used as an index of somatic mutation, i.e., mutation occurring in a body cell other than those cells that are set aside for reproduction. I felt that I should hke to know what really caused these 'spontaneous' mutations. Out of this there arose my current professional interest in ageing and the eventual genesis of this book. Somatic mutation I have already mentioned the term 'somatic mutation' in contrast to germ-line mutation. The phrase was first used by Tyzzer in 1916 in relation to cancer, and since then one can say broadly that cancer theories have alternated between those that ascribed cancer to virus action and those that in one form or another blamed somatic mutation. In 1957 I rather firmly committed myself to support of the somatic mutational side, and have never found cause to change that viewpoint. Indeed, my interest in somatic mutation has steadily extended into other areas of the medical sciences rather faster in fact
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3