Studies of Biosynthesis in Escherichia Coli by Roberts, Richard B., Cowie, Dean B., Abelson, Philip H., Bolton, Ellis T. and Britten, Roy J - 1955

Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1955. First edition. 1955

SCARCE SUMMARY OF PIONEERING RESEARCH BY LEADERS OF THE DAWN OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, INSCRIBED BY ROY BRITTEN TO PROMINENT ARTIST BEN SHAHN, WHO INITIALLY STUDIED BIOLOGY AT NYU.

10 inches tall hardcover, green cloth binding, gilt title to cover and spine, xiv, 521 pp, near fine in custom mylar archival cover. From the Library of the artists Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn, with an estate label designed by their son, Jonathan Shahn. This copy Inscribed on front paste-down by co-author Roy J. Britten to Ben Shahn: "Ben, Amongst the mass of detail (necessary to satisfy others because of the extreme and rapidly fulfilled interdependence of science) perhaps will be apparent some simple and creative ideas. Roy."

ROY J. BRITTEN (1919-2012) was an American molecular biologist known for his discovery of repeated DNA sequences in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms, and later on the evolution of the genome. attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, Ontario, and then went to the University of Virginia to study physics. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student in physics in 1940. At the beginning of World War II, he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. In 1951, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. From 1951 to 1971, he was a staff member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. While there he attended the phage course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and started working on the processes by which genetic information becomes expressed as proteins. This work was conducted with colleagues Bill H. Hoyer, Brian J. McCarthy, Ellis T. Bolton, Richard B. Roberts, David Kohne, and others. This work led him to want to understand the structure of the chromosome, which was little understood at the time. He developed a new method to explore the sequence structure of DNA using the idea of DNA hybridization. Through this work, he showed that eukaryotic genomes have many repetitive, non-coding DNA sequences, known as repeated sequences. These are now known to be important in the regulation of gene expression in most cells. Britten then moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he remained for the rest of his career. He continued to work on DNA sequence structure, with a particular focus on evolutionary relationships. He made important contributions to the DNA relationships of Humans and Great Apes, and especially to the importance of transposable elements in how genes change over evolutionary history. Britten died 2/22/2012 at 92--obit in Science 9 March 2012, p 1183.

BEN SHAHN (1898 – 1969) was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Shahn began his path to becoming an artist in New York, where he was first trained as a lithographer. Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he went on to pursue art at City College in 1921 and then at the National Academy of Design. The artist was especially active as an academic in the last two decades of his life. He received honorary doctorates from Princeton University and Harvard University, and joined Harvard as a Charles Eliot Norton professor in 1956. His published writings, including The Biography of Painting (1956) and The Shape of Content (1960), became influential works in the art world.