Mesel­son & Stahl, the Con­ver­sa­tion

by Roberto

Fig­ure 1. Matthew Mesel­son and Frank Stahl, Feb­ru­ary 2020. Source

A few days ago, Christoph sent the rest of us at STC a most up­lift­ing mes­sage. A con­ver­sa­tionbe­tween Matt Mesel­son and Frank Stahl, de­scrib­ing their "most beau­ti­ful ex­per­i­ment," had just pre­miered in iBiology.org. Much has been writ­ten about the land­mark ex­per­i­ment that pro­vided di­rect ev­i­dence for the semi­con­ser­v­a­tivena­ture of DNA repli­ca­tion, in­clud­ing a Pic­tures Con­sid­ered post here at STC. This new video epit­o­mizes some­thing that I find re­mark­able about the prac­tice of sci­ence. When car­ried out by won­der­ful in­di­vid­u­als, the re­sults are not only ad­vances in knowl­edge. Of equal sig­nif­i­cance are the true and last­ing friend­ships that emerge.

I could go on writ­ing about the Mesel­son-Stahl ex­per­i­ment for quite a while, but your time will be bet­ter spent watch­ing the video. I'll limit my­self to re­lat­ing a sel­dom-heard vi­gnette about how the land­mark 1958 pa­per came to be writ­ten. Af­ter ob­tain­ing the re­sults, Matt and Frank wanted to con­tinue do­ing more ex­per­i­ments. To get them to sit down and write the man­u­script, Max Del­brück drove them from Pasadena to Caltech's Corona del Mar ma­rine sta­tion and "forced" them to write while se­cluded away from the lab at a site over­look­ing the beach. I first heard this story as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in the mid-1970s and it re­ally stuck with me. It in­spired me to have my lab go off for a week-long re­treat in Maine every Oc­to­ber. Later in life, I had the good for­tune of in­ter­act­ing per­son­ally with both Matt and Frank. In per­son they proved to be equally in­spir­ing. Their con­ver­sa­tion makes this read­ily ap­par­ent.