Phage legend and variants
Ian A. York
Apparently one of the more mysterious items in the FAQ (found at
http://www.urbanlegends.com) is this one:
U. Filamentous phage M13 obtained from lab's letter rejecting the
transfer!
The U means that the truth or falsehood is unknown. I gather that, never
mind true or false, the legend that's being described here is mystifying
enough. Here's the consensus version I've heard. (I've heard this
several times, but never with much more detail than this, and never
attached to any particular lab.)
In the early days of molecular biology - way back in the dark ages, maybe
the early 1980's or even the 1970's (if you can believe it!) one of the
most popular ways of manipulating DNA was to use viruses which infect the
bacterium E. coli. These things - phages - contain DNA and infect
bacteria, whereupon they replicate like mad, kill off the bacteria, and
provide very high levels of their own DNA. You can tweak these guys to
contain other DNA, and bingo: you've got large amounts of the DNA you're
interested in. Very useful. They're less used now, as there are other
methods for doing the same thing, but they're still pretty common. One
such phage is M13. (According to the genetic map I have in front of me
right now, it's a filamentous, male-specific, E. coli bacteriophage with a
circular single-stranded DNA genome of 6407 bases. For those of you
interested in molecular biology history, M13 is one of the bases from
which the popular pUC series of plasmids was constructed by Messing et
al.)
The story goes that scientist A. had published a paper on some particular
DNA that he'd cloned into a phage. The accepted mores of science mean
that, once the system was published, Dr A was obligated to provide the
phage to anyone else interested in it; so Dr B wrote to him and asked for
the DNA.
Dr A wrote back and gave some excuse - I've heard different versions,
ranging from outright refusal to claiming he no longer had it - but
anyway, did not provide the phage. Dr B looked at this refusal letter
and reasoned that it had probably been written in Dr A's lab; and from
that, he wondered if any phage had been floating around in the lab on the
day A wrote the letter. Dr B soaked the letter in medium, added it to
some bacteria, and lo and behold out grew a phage - which, sure enough,
turned out to be the one Dr A supposedly didn't have.
So that's the story. It's classic UL material: a lovely moral, a nice
plot twist, short and snappy. It's neither obviously false (the trick
could be done) nor obviously true (I'd bet that 99% of the time, if you
tried that, you'd come up empty). It's reasonably well-known among the
geek crowd I hang out with.
Most of the people I've talked to only know the version I give above:
let's call it the vanilla version. Last night, I went out with a bunch of
friends, had a Vietnamese dinner that couldn't be beat, saw the Best of
Spike and Mike's Animation festival, and got some more versions of this.
The contributor (Paul) was formerly a professor at Harvard and now works
in biotech. The first version he heard was in the spring of 1979, and
he's heard two other versions since.
Pal's first version was rather different in that it wasn't M13, but was a
phage of Corynebacterium parvum. (C. parvum is now reclassified as
Propionibacterium acnes. I don't know a lot about it. Phages are used in
studies of most bacteria, but not as a tool for DNA manipulation but
rather for examining the bacterium.) He said that he heard it with a lot
of detail, but (significantly) without any identification of the labs
involved.
His second version was the vanilla one. The third took it out of science
altogether and into beer (not that the two are entirely unconnected): it
involved a brewer writing to a commercial brewery and asking for their
yeast strain, getting a refusal letter and you know the rest.
A fourth version was provided a while ago by Yetanotherpaul. Paul
Tomblin had heard the M13 version with a twist: in his, Scientist A
wanted to give the phage to B, but lawyers were involved and refused to
allow it. Dr A wrote a regretful refusal to B, but hinted between the
lines that the phage was in the letter and B caught on. In this version,
the moral is still there but is pointed at the lawyers instead of the
scientists, which changes the flavour quite a bit. There's also a new
conspiracy element which wasn't in any other version I've heard.
However, this version is reminiscent of something Jan Harold Brunvand
talks about in _Curses! Broiled Again!_ (ISBN 0-393-30711-5, WW Norton,
New York, 1989) - pp 73-75 in my paperbound version: The Message Under
The Stamp --
... In 1943, his [Brunvand's correspondent] recounted in a letter a
story that was going around about another sailor stationed in the
Pacific.
...after a time, his letters stopped arriving.
His mother was distraught. And she was well-nigh inconsolable after
Navy authorities contacted her and reported that her son had been taken
prisoner by the enemy.
The mother eventually received a letter from her son. He was
confined to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he said, but he was safe
and was being treated well.
When the mother steamed off the stamp, though, she found a hidden
message from him: "They've cut off my hands!"
... [another version about the Gestapo having cut off the prisoner's
hands.]
I've heard versions of the story that try to explain what led the
mother to remove the stamp. In these versions, the son suggests in his
letter that she should steam off the stamp for "little Alf" or "little
Johnny" to add to his collection. But there is no little Alf or Johnny
in the family. Nor are there any stamp collectors. The mother finally
realizes this is a clue and steams the stamp off the envelope, finding
the message.
Given its wartime setting, it's not surprising that one variation
pushes the origin of the story back from the Second World War to the
First.
In his autobiography _Exit Laughing, publishes in 1941, Irwin S.
Cobb describes a "sad little tale whish sprang up 24 years ago and now
is enjoying a popular revival. It's the heart-moving one about the
German housewife who writes a letter to her kinfolks in America that
everything is just dandy [soaks off stamp and] underneath are the words
"We are starving." I don't know how we'd get along without that standby
every time war breaks out in Europe," Cobb adds.
Brunvand points out a bunch of things showing that the first version is
clearly nonsense, and Cobb clearly didn't believe the second (civilian)
version.
The secret hidden in the letter, and especially the hint by which the
sender points to the secret, sound a lot like the phage (remember the
phage? This here's a post about phages) story. If so, then this
relatively recent science geek legend has antecedents going back at least
80 years.
Ian "FAQ: U" York
--
Ian A. York (iay...@panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
"In despair, I turned to Aristotle, ever the snugglebunny
in times of stress." --Madeleine Page
Russ Arcuri
iay...@panix.com (Ian A. York) wrote:
> One
> such phage is M13. (According to the genetic map I have in front of me
> right now, it's a filamentous, male-specific, E. coli bacteriophage with a
> circular single-stranded DNA genome of 6407 bases.
Sorry, Ian. M13 is the great globular cluster of stars in the
constellation Hercules, first discovered by Edmund Halley and documented
by Charles Messier (hence the "M"). Oops, sorry... I just realized where
I was... I thought this was sci.astro.amateur...
Russ "As for voracity, this is http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m013.html
we're talking about" Arcuri
Lee Rudolph
rar...@colgate.edu (Russ Arcuri) writes:
>iay...@panix.com (Ian A. York) wrote:
>
>> One
>> such phage is M13. (According to the genetic map I have in front of me
>> right now, it's a filamentous, male-specific, E. coli bacteriophage with a
>> circular single-stranded DNA genome of 6407 bases.
>
>Sorry, Ian. M13 is the great globular cluster of stars in the
>constellation Hercules,
Sorry, Russ. M13 is the branch of British Intelligence that's been
seconded to McDonalds to spy on London Greenpeace.
Lee "no doubt their E. coli connections are very helpful" Rudolph