Walter Reed

-Major Walter Reed, M.D., (September 13, 1851 November 22, 1902) was a U.S. Armyphysician who in 1900 led the team which postulated and confirmed the theory that yellow feveris transmitted by a particular mosquito species, rather than by direct contact. This insight gave impetus to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine, and most immediately allowed the resumption and completion of work on the Panama Canal (19041914) by the United States. Reed followed work started by Carlos Finlay and directed by George Miller Sternberg ("first U.S. bacteriologist"). Walter Reed, an American medical doctor had received his medical degree by the time he was 18 years old. He married Emilie Lawrence and they had two children, a son and a daughter. They also adopted an Indian girl. Walter was a very young doctor. He thought he might have more opportunities for advancement if he joined the military, so he joined the Army and became a captain. For 16 years he served in an outpost * far away from other doctors. At one time he was looking after several hundred Indians. He wanted to be able to study and learn more about medicine, so he asked for a four month leave. He learned so well they allowed him to study for seven months at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He continued to study and do experiments at the Army outpost. He and some other doctors studied typhoid fever * . The disease was rampant in the army camps. Many times people were carriers of the disease without having the symptoms themselves. They would be among the other soldiers carrying the disease and then those soldiers would become sick and die. Sanitary conditions were poor. People would not wash their hands before eating and then would become ill. Reed and the other doctors could recommend better sanitary conditions, but they couldn't order them. Flies would also transfer the disease from human waste to food. Yellow fever * was a dreaded disease. 90,000 people in the United States had died of the disease. Thousands of American soldiers in Cuba had died also. Reed observed that people who cared for the patients with yellow fever didn't usually get the disease. His conclusion : people didn't catch it from each other. Reed began looking for answers. He remembered the research they had done on typhoid fever. He wondered if maybe mosquitoes might be spreading it. Some of the doctors and soldiers volunteered to take part in the experiment.

The mosquitoes were put in test tubes. First they bit the arms of men who already had yellow fever. Then they were allowed to bite the arms of people who didn't have the disease. After many tests, they decided the mosquito did carry the disease from one person to another. The next step was to get rid of the mosquitoes. They sprayed the areas of water where the mosquitoes were hatching, with chemicals. This stopped the spread of the disease. Reed's success with stopping the spread of yellow fever made it possible for the building of the Panama Canal where previously the mosquitoes had caused so much death due to the disease. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. is named in honor of him.

Mattthew Meselson
-Matthew Stanley Meselson (born May 24, 1930) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist whose research was important in showing how DNA replicates,recombines and is repaired in cells. In his mature years, he has been an active chemicaland biological weapons activist and consultant. He is married to the medical anthropologist and biological weapons writer Jeanne Guillemin.

DNA breakthroughs
In 1957 with Franklin Stahl he showed that DNA replicates semi-conservatively. The MeselsonStahl experiment used the Escherichia coli grown in the presence of the nitrogen isotope nitrogen-15, which was then switched to be grown with normal nitrogen, nitrogen-14. When they extracted the DNA using density centrifugation they found three types of DNA, one containing nitrogen-15, one containing nitrogen-14, and a hybrid containing both isotopes. When the hybrid DNA was made single stranded by heating, they could show one parental strand and one that had been newly synthesised, so when DNA is synthesised the DNA double helix splits into two, each of the single strands acting as a template for the synthesis of a complementary strand. This phenomenon is called semi-conservative DNA replication. He showed in the years that followed many more theories in relation to this with the help of Jean Weigle. In 1961 with Frank Stahl, Sydney Brenner and Franois Jacob he later demonstrated that ribosomal RNA molecules are stable, which later proved the existence of mRNA - a problem scientists had struggled with previously. He later showed with Charles Radding that genetic recombination results from the splicing of DNA molecules. He also demonstrated the enzymatic basis of a process by which cells recognize and destroy foreign DNA, and discovered methyl-directed mismatch repair, which enables cells to repair mistakes in DNA. The Meselson effect The Meselson laboratory studies the evolution of asexuality in bdelloid rotifers. Meselson described the "Meselson effect", in which two alleles in an asexual organism evolve independently and divergently over time, producing what is essentially two genomes in one organism. This is due to the lack of sexual recombination which shuffles genes between alleles during meiosis. Meselson's laboratory provided exciting evidence that this is indeed the case in asexual bdelloid rotifers, and the Meselson effect was subsequently used to explain how bdelloid rotifers deal with dehydration. Dr. Alan Tunnacliffe's Cambridge lab showed that the lea gene had diverged through the Meselson effect into two different genes whose protein products work in synergy to preserve the organism during periods of dehydration, suggesting that the Meselson effect is a mechanism of generating variation that confers evolutionary advantage.[3]

Chemical and biological weapons disarmament activism In 1963 Meselson served as a resident consultant in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, since then he has been involved in chemical and biological weapons disarmament policy formation as a consultant and through the Harvard Sussex Program, a disarmament think-tank. Meselson was a leader in a 1980s effort investigating allegations made by the CIA and

the US State Department that "yellow rain" was a Soviet biological warfare agent. Meselson was among several scientists who work concluded that the purported agent was bee droppings. In 1992-94, Meselson investigated and reported on the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, a 1979 bio-

warfare mishap in the Soviet Union that resulted in the deaths of 64 persons. Despite his earlier efforts to demonstrate the "innocent" nature of the accident, Meselson's investigation incontrovertably proved that the Soviets had a secret bio-weapons program in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

Frank Stahl
-Dr. Franklin William Stahl (born October 8, 1929) is an American molecular biologist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experimentshowing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for the "replicated" strand. He is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene, Oregon.

Francis Jacob -Jacob (born June 17, 1920 in Nancy, France) is a French biologist who, together withJacques
Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs throughfeedback on transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and Andr Lwoff. In 1961 Jacob and Monod explored the idea that the control of enzyme expression levels in cells is a result of feedback on the transcription of DNA sequences. Their experiments and ideas gave

impetus to the emerging field of molecular developmental biology, and of transcriptional regulation in particular. For many years it had been known that bacterial and other cells could respond to external conditions by regulating levels of their key metabolic enzymes, and/or the activity of these enzymes. For instance, if a bacterium finds itself in a broth containing lactose, rather than the simpler sugar glucose, it must adapt itself to the need to 1) import lactose, 2) cleave lactose to its constituents glucose and galactose, and 3) convert the galactose to glucose. It was known that cells ramp up their production of the enzymes that do these steps when exposed to lactose, rather than wastefully producing these enzymes all the time. Studies of enzyme activity control were progressing through theories of the (allosteric) action of small molecules on the enzyme molecule itself (switching it on or off), but the method of controlling the enzyme production was not well understood at the time. With the earlier determination of the structure and central importance of DNA, it became clear that all proteins were being produced in some way from its genetic code, and that this step might form a key control point. Jacob and Monod made key experimental and theoretical discoveries that demonstrated that in the case of the lactose system outlined above (in the bacterium E. coli), there are specific proteins that are devoted to repressing the transcription of the DNA to its product (RNA, which in turn is decoded into protein). This repressor (the lac repressor) is made in all cells, binding directly to DNA at the genes it controls, and physically preventing the transcription apparatus from gaining access to the DNA. In the presence of lactose, this repressor binds lactose, making it no longer able to bind to DNA, and the transcriptional repression is lifted. In this way, a robust feedback loop is constructed that allows the set of lactose-digesting proteins products to be made only when they are needed. Jacob and Monod extended this repressor model to all genes in all organisms in their initial exuberance. The regulation of gene activity has developed into a very large sub-discipline of molecular biology, and in truth exhibits enormous variety in mechanism and many levels of complexity. Current researchers find regulatory events at every conceivable level of the processes that express genetic information. In the relatively simple genome of baker's yeast, (saccharomyces cerevisiae), 405 of its 6,419 protein-encoding genes are directly involved in transcriptional control, compared to 1,938 that are enzymes.

IRRI
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is an international NGO. Its headquarters are in Los Baos, Laguna, Philippines, and it has offices in ten countries. The main goal of IRRI is to find sustainable ways to improve the well-being of poor rice farmers and consumers, as well as the environment. The institute is one of 15 agricultural research centers around the world that form the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). It is Asia's largest non-profit agricultural research center.

IRRI was established in 1960 and its research activities began in 1962. IRRI is well known for its contribution to the "Green Revolution" movement inAsia during late 1960s and 70s, which involved the breeding of "semidwarf" varieties of rice that were less likely to lodge (fall over). The varieties developed at IRRI, known as IR varieties, are well accepted in many Asian countries.