John Cairns
Cairns, John (1922-) is a British scientist whose distinguished career has included research in molecular biology, cancer, and public health.
Hugh John Forster Cairns was born in Oxford, England. He attended Oxford University as an undergraduate and received his medical degree from Oxford in 1943. Cairns then worked in England, Australia, and Uganda.
Much of Cairns's early work involved the study of viruses. Among his accomplishments was the discovery in 1952 that the influenza virus is released from an infected cell in a slow trickle. In contrast, a bacteriophage —a virus that attacks bacteria—is released from an infected cell in a burst. In 1959, he also carried out the first gene mapping of an animal virus.
In 1963, he became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, and then took a position at the State University of New York in 1968. Much of his work from 1960 to 1969 dealt with DNA structure and replication and established the nature of some basic mechanisms by which DNA replicates, including its replication in bacteria and viruses and the separation of its two strands. In 1970, Cairns accepted a position at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. There he began studies of cancer and its connection to genetic mechanisms, including research on the link between DNA and cancer. Most recently, he helped pioneer research on adaptive mutation —mutation as a result of an organism deliberately adapting to its environment to improve its chance of survival.
Cairns returned to the United States in 1982 to join the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and remained there until his retirement in 1991. His books include Cancer: Science and Society and Matters of Life and Death.