Download or read book The Professor, the Institute, and DNA written by René Jules Dubos and published by Rockefeller Univ. Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oswald Theodore Avery is little known outside of the scientific community. Yet, this extraordinary man, here brought vividly to life by a perceptive friend and sophisticated scientific colleague, was a monumental force in the development of medical research in the United States. Even among scientists, Avery is known chiefly as the senior author of a paper published in 1944 that identified DNA as the purveyor of genetic information. Two things make this highly personalized biography a landmark volume. First, its technical chapters clarify the philosophical concepts that lie behind today's understanding of the immunology of bacterial infection. Second, not a single existing textbook has ever described the laborious methods by which the men in Avery's laboratory discovered the genetic import of DNA.