10. Reverse transcriptase to the rescue

A few months after Dombroski had isolated L1.2A but before her isolation of L1.2B from the mother’s DNA, Abram Gabriel had approached me with an experimental idea. I knew Gabriel from his days as a medical student at Hopkins, and I knew he was another of the bright, serious young minds attracted to Johns Hopkins to carry out biomedical research. Abram had done a research elective with Alan Scott and me on hemoglobin genes one summer while in medical school. Now he was working on a transposable element from a Trypanosome, a parasite. This transposable element, called CRE-1, had a similar structure to that of human L1, and it too was thought to be a retrotransposon, acting through an RNA intermediate. Abram had hooked up with Jef Boeke, the ....