In 1976, Harold Varmus and Michael Bishop reported their pathbreaking discovery that a nucleotide sequence--the four letters of the DNA alphabet--of single-stranded, radioactive DNA from the normal cells of various species of birds (cDNA) could "anneal," or associate, with the cancer-causing gene, or oncogene, in Avian sarcoma virus (ASV) to form a double-stranded molecule. Their discovery suggested that normal, non-cancerous cells contain genes--proto-oncogenes, as Varmus and Bishop called them--that might mutate and cause cancer. The ultimate cause of cancer, the two scientists suggested, was to be found within our own genes. This slide provided a schematic of the annealing process.
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