Hugh John Forster Cairns. 21 November 1922—12 November 2018

Abstract

John Cairns was a magnet for scientists (and non-scientists) of all types, from undergraduates to Nobel laureates. For him science was fun, and discussing science with others even more fun. Soon after finishing medical school (Oxford) at the end of the Second World War he gravitated towards research, his first publication linking the incidence of penicillin-resistant bacteria with long hospital stays. He then studied virology with Macfarlane Burnet FRS in Melbourne, Australia, after which he repaid his two years of National Service from the Second World War at the Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, Uganda. He returned to Australia (Canberra), continuing influenza virus research. However, while visiting Caltech in the 1950s, he was exposed to the emerging field of molecular biology, of which he became a pioneer. After returning to Canberra from a sabbatical with Alfred Hershey at Cold Spring Harbor in 1961, he showed that the Escherichia coli genome is circular, and demonstrated the replication fork. In 1963 he was appointed director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). He successfully saved CSHL from bankruptcy before handing over directorship to Jim Watson (ForMemRS 1981). At CSHL he proved that the so-called Kornberg DNA polymerase was not required for replication of the E. coli genome. In the 1970s Cairns turned his attention to understanding cancer and moved to North London to direct a small research institute in Mill Hill, a satellite of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund based in central London. Cairns wrote two influential reviews on cancer plus the book Cancer: science and society , seamlessly weaving together information across disciplines, from human population levels to molecular levels, plus everything in between. He fostered multi-disciplinary basic research at the Mill Hill labs, recruiting scientists who used model organisms such as bacteria, fruit flies, slime moulds, amphibians and mice as models to explore the determinants of cell fate during development; such pathways seemed likely to be involved in the transformation of normal cells into cancer cells. Cairns created and fostered an exceptionally stimulating, interactive, nurturing and cutting-edge research environment that launched the careers of many scientists. In his own lab at Mill Hill, Cairns discovered new pathways for DNA alkylation repair in E. coli , and subsequently as professor of cancer biology at the Harvard School of Public Health he discovered what is now known as stress-induced mutagenesis, also in E. coli .