Howard Temin

Origins and early life

Howard Martin Temin was born in Philadelphia on 10 December 1934, the second of three sons of Henry Temin, a lawyer, and of Annette Temin, who was active in civic affairs. His parents were progressive Jews, and when he reached his bar mitzvah the family gave the money that would have paid for the party to a camp for displaced persons. Summers from 1949 at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine set his course while he was still at school, and he graduated from Swarthmore College in 1955 before going on to the California Institute of Technology.

Work and career

There he joined the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco to work on the Rous sarcoma virus, which causes cancer in chickens, and by 1959 had concluded with Harry Rubin that the virus must merge with the genes of the cell it infects. In 1960 he moved to the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research in Madison, Wisconsin, and in 1964 put forward his DNA provirus hypothesis: that this RNA virus is copied into DNA, which settles in the chromosomes of the cell.

Many leading scientists called the idea impossible until, in 1970, he and Satoshi Mizutani found in the virus the enzyme that copies RNA into DNA, reverse transcriptase, published in Nature in the same issue as David Baltimore, who found it independently.

Recognition

The 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went jointly to Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco and Temin “for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell”, and at the banquet he spoke out against smoking. He also helped Soviet scientists isolated by the KGB, many of them Jews, to keep up with research, and from 1985 to 1994 sat on twelve national and international committees on HIV and AIDS.

Married in 1962 to the geneticist Rayla Greenberg, with whom he had two daughters, he died of lung cancer in Madison on 9 February 1994, aged 59, although he had never smoked.