Albert Lasker Award
for Special Achievement in Medical Science

Many scientists became intrigued with science while still quite young. For me, as a schoolboy in Southern California, it was chemistry and the thought that perhaps chemistry and physics could eventually explain how living things replicate themselves. Except for the guiding framework of classical genetics and some general insights from structural chemistry, the subject was then almost totally mysterious.

In 1953, I was accepted into a graduate program at the University of Chicago called "Mathematical Biophysics." These were attractive key words to a young person wanting to apply chemistry and physics to biology before DNA had set the agenda. Intending to leave for Chicago, I was invited to a swimming pool party at the Pauling house in Sierra Madre. Linus, whose course in General Chemistry I had taken as a Caltech undergraduate, came out of his study, looked down at me in the water and said, "Well, Matt, what will you do next year?" Hearing my plan, his response was, "But that's a lot of baloney. Why don't you come be my graduate student?" Of course, that's what I did.

That happy chance led to much else: going to Woods Hole in 1954 as Jim Watson's summer research assistant; meeting Frank Stahl there; coming under the intellectually rigorous influence of Max Delbrück and the Caltech phage group; density-gradient centrifugation; semi-conservation; Brenner, Jacob, and messenger RNA; phage lambda recombination with Jean Weigle; and unending talk about science with Caltech house mates Frank Stahl, Jan Drake, Howard Temin, and our regular dinner partner, John Cairns.

And then at Harvard many superb students and post-docs; more recombination; DNA mismatch repair; class I restriction and modification enzymes; and now trying to understand why males and meiosis exist.

I was extraordinarily fortunate in starting research just when the structure of DNA was discovered. For all of us, the structure itself posed the important questions and hinted at the answers: How it replicates; how it recombines; how it mutates; how it carries information for protein sequence; and since only nucleic acids can read it, a hint about how information gets out of the nucleus to specify proteins in the cytoplasm. A guidebook to the previously secret garden of life!

Still more good fortune provided the funds for molecular biologists to pursue these problems long before any practical application came into view. That was in substantial part because of the insight and dedication of those individuals at the NSF and the NIH who believed that the most basic science must be supported regardless of potential application and were independent-minded enough to buck the bureaucracy when necessary.

So to my teachers, colleagues and students, to those whose support has been essential, and to the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation for its fostering and recognition of biological research, many thanks.