p53 (33 page)

Besides my personal interviews with many of the key players in the p53 story, I have tapped into a rich repository of information contained in a great number of books, journals
and multimedia websites in my research for this book. I often used multiple sources for a single discussion point, and list here those I found particularly useful and that deserve special mention
in each chapter. Some sources, however, have provided information, insights and ideas of relevance throughout the book. They include:

Preface

The epigraph from Gerard Evan comes from my interview with him in Cambridge, England, in June 2012.

Chapter 1: Flesh of our Own Flesh

The epigraph from Peyton Rous comes from his lecture to the Nobel Committee on winning the prize, ‘The Challenge to Man of the Neoplastic Cell’, available at
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1966/rous-lecture.html

Besides the
Conversation
recorded at MIT and cited above, Robert Weinberg spoke of his work with Doug Hanahan on the Hallmarks of Cancer at a conference of the National Cancer Research
Institute in 2010. Available at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4js-yYK2U)

Chapter 2: The Enemy Within

The epigraph from Michael Bishop comes from his book,
How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science
(Harvard University Press, 2003), page 161.

For information on Peyton Rous, I relied on the excellent archives of the Nobel Foundation, see:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1966/rous-bio.html

Besides their autobiographical books already cited, the Nobel archive also was a rich source of information on Varmus and Bishop, who won the prize in 1989. See
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1989

For the Asilomar debate see M. J. Peterson, 2010,
Asilomar Conference on Laboratory Precautions.
International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Technology. Available at
www.umass.edu/sts/ethics

Chapter 3: Discovery

The epigraph comes from Judson’s book,
The Eighth Day of Creation,
cited above, page 10. The footnote quote is from Jeffrey Taubenberger; see
www.pathsoc.org/conversations

Chapter 4: Unseeable Biology

The epigraph comes from
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson (London: Transworld Publishers, 2003), page 451.

For this chapter I relied substantially on the information provided by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, available at
www.genome.gov
.

Chapter 6: A Case of Mistaken Identity

The epigraph from Judson comes from
The Eighth Day of Creation
cited above, page 594
.

Besides the conversation recorded at MIT cited above, see Robert Weinberg’s description of his discovery of oncogenes in human tumours, available at
http://www.bioinfo.org.cn/book/Great%20Experments/great25.htm

See also
Nature Milestone 17
and
18
on the discovery of the first human oncogene and on oncogene co-operation
www.nature.com/milestones/milecancer/timeline.html

Chapter 7: A New Angle on Cancer

The epigraph from the 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne comes from
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

For information on Henry Harris, I relied on the rich archive of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network set up by Cardiff University with support from the Wellcome Trust. See
http://www.genmedhist.info/interviews/
.
See also ‘How Tumour Suppressor Genes were Discovered’ by Henry Harris in
Journal of the Federation of American Societies for
Experimental Biology (FASEB)
, Volume 7, pages 978-79.

The most important sources for the finding of the first
tumour-suppressor gene are the MIT conversation with Weinberg cited above and
Natural Obsessions: striving to
unlock the deepest secrets of the cancer cell
, by Natalie Angier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

Chapter 8: p53 Reveals its True Colours

The epigraph from Francis Crick, co-discoverer with James Watson of the double-helix structure of DNA, comes from
The Eighth Day of Creation
, page 93.

Suzy Baker tells her story in S. J. Baker (2003), Redefining p53: Entering the Tumor Suppressor Era.
Cell Cycle
, Volume 2, pages 7-8.

Chapter 9: Master Switch

The epigraph from Matt Ridley comes from his book,
Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters
, page 271. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers
Ltd © 1999 Matt Ridley.

Besides the personal interviews, this chapter relied heavily on the book
25 Years of p53 Research
, cited at the beginning of these notes.

Chapter 10: ‘Guardian of the Genome’

The epigraph from David Lane comes from his commentary, ‘Worrying about p53’, in
Current Biology
, Vol. 2 (1992), pages 581-583.

Chapter 11: Of Autumn Leaves and Cell Death

The epigraph comes from
The Man Without Qualities,
a novel by the Austrian Robert Musil, unfinished at the time of his death in 1942 and published posthumously (London:
Pan Macmillan, 1997, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike).

John Kerr’s own paper, ‘History of the events leading to the formulation of the apoptosis concept’, published in
Toxicology
, Volumes 181-182 (2002), pages 471-474, was
a key resource.

The interview with Richard Lockshin appears in R. A. Lockshin (2008), Early work on apoptosis, an interview with Richard Lockshin.
Cell Death and
Differentiation
, Volume 15, pages 1091–95.

Chapter 12: Of Mice and Men

The epigraph comes from
The Eighth Day of Creation,
page 73.

A key resource for this chapter was the archive of the Nobel Foundation, which awarded the 2007 Prize for Medicine to Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Martin Evans for their work on
transgenic mice. See
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/

Another important source of information was the National Human Genome Research Institute. See
www.genome.gov/10005834

Chapter 13:The Guardian’s Gatekeeper

The epigraph from Gerard Evan comes from my interview with him in Cambridge, England, in June 2012.

Besides the personal interviews, this chapter relied heavily on the book
25 Years of p53 Research,
cited at the beginning of these notes. See especially Chapter 4: Gatekeepers of the
Guardian: p53 regulation by post-translational modification, MDM2 and MDMX, by Geoffrey Wahl, Jayne Stommel, Kurt Krummel and Mark Wade.

Chapter 14: The Smoking Gun

The epigraph from Siddhartha Mukherjee comes from his book
The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer
, page 241. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers © 2011 Siddhartha Mukherjee.

For information on Richard Doll and his research, I drew on two main sources:
Life of A Revolutionary
, by Jonathan Wood, a review of Conrad Keating’s biography of Doll that
appeared as an ‘Oxford Science Blog’ from the University
of Oxford on 11th November 2009, available at
www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/091111.html
, and
Doll’s paper in the
British Medical Journal
of 30th September 1950: ‘Smoking and carcinoma of the lung: preliminary report’ by Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill.

Information on Angel Roffo is drawn from ‘Angel H Roffo: the forgotten father of experimental tobacco carcinogenesis’ by Robert Proctor (2006), in
Bulletin of the World Health
Organization
, Volume 84, pages 494–96.

A rich source of information for this chapter was the wealth of original documents that the tobacco industry was obliged by US law to make public and which are available online at
tobaccodocuments.org
.
See especially
tobaccodocuments.org/profiles/roffo_ah.html
and
tobaccodocuments.org/atc/60359252.html#images

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, developed and managed by the University of California, San Francisco, also has more than 14 million documents available for scrutiny at
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/

A key source for this chapter was the paper by Asaf Bitton and colleagues (including Stanton Glantz) in
The Lancet
of January 2005 (pages 531–540): ‘The p53 tumour suppressor gene
and the tobacco industry: research, debate and conflict of interest’.

See also the interview with Glantz in
Frontline: Inside the Tobacco Deal
. Available at
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/interviews/glantz.html
.
Copyright
© 1995–2014 WGBH Education Foundation. See also
The Cigarette Papers
, edited by Stanton A. Glantz
et al.
, 1998 (University of California Press)

For the p53 database see
http://p53.iarc.fr/

Chapter 15: Following the Fingerprints

The quotation by Isaac Asimov, American biochemist and science writer, used for the epigraph is of unknown origin, but widely used.

For this chapter I relied on two key documents: ‘A role for sunlight in skin cancer: UV-induced p53 mutations in squamous cell carcinoma’ by Douglas E. Brash
et al
., in
PNAS
, Vol. 88, pages 10124–28, November 1991 and ‘Sunlight and Skin Cancer’ by David J. Leffell and Douglas E. Brash, in
Scientific American
, Vol.
275, 52–59, reproduced with permission copyright © 1996 Scientific American, inc. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 16: Cancer in the Family

The epigraph from Patricia Prolla comes from my interview with her, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2012.

Chapter 17: The
Tropeiro
Connection?

The epigraph is from the Polish-born physicist Marie Curie, famed for her pioneering work on radioactivity in the early 20th century.

Chapter 18: Jekyll and Hyde

The epigraph from James Watson, American molecular biologist best known as co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the double-helix structure of DNA, comes from
The Eighth Day
of Creation
, page 27.

An important reference document for this chapter was ‘Mutant p53 Gain-of-Function in Cancer’ by Moshe Oren and Varda Rotter, in
Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology
,
2010, Volume 2, a001107. Available at
cshperspectives.com/content/2/2/a001107.full

For the information on Stanley Prusiner, I relied on the archive of the Nobel Foundation, which awarded him the Prize for Medicine in 1997. See
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1997

Other key references were two papers, published simultaneously in the same journal,
Cell
, Volume 119, 2004, by Tyler Jacks and Gigi Lozano and their colleagues: ‘Mutant p53 Gain
of Function in Two Mouse Models of Li-Fraumeni
Syndrome’ by Kenneth P Olive
et al.
(847–860) and ‘Gain of Function of a p53 Hot Spot Mutation in a Mouse
Model of Li-Fraumeni Syndrome’ by Gene A Lang
et al
. (861–872).

See also ‘Mutant p53: one name, many proteins’ by William A. Freed-Pastor and Carol Prives, in
Genes and Development
, 2012, Volume 26, 1268–86.

Chapter 19: Cancer and Ageing – a Balancing Act?

The epigraph from John Maddox, editor emeritus of
Nature
, comes from his introduction to
The Eighth Day of Creation
by Horace Freeland Judson, page xii.

Key sources for this chapter were ‘Using Mice to Examine p53 Function in Cancer, Aging, and Longevity’ by Lawrence A. Donehower,
Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology
,
2009, 1:a001081, see
http://cshperspectives.cshlp.org
;
‘Two faces of p53: aging and tumour suppression’ by Francis Rodier
et al.
in
Nucleic Acids Research
,
2007, Vol. 35, pages 7475–84; ‘Modulation of mammalian life span by the short isoform of p53’ by Bernhard Maier
et al
.
Genes and Development
, 2004, Volume 18, pages 306-19.
Video recording of Dr Brian Kennedy, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, in conversation with Judith Campisi, 5th February 2013, available at
http://vimeo.com/58981629
.