霍华德·马丁·特明1934—1994

事实上，特明聘雇的博士后研究员水谷哲（Satoshi Mizutani）才是发现逆转录酶的论文第一作者。此事成为著名的诺贝尔奖争议之一。

Howard Martin Temin (December 10, 1934 – February 9, 1994) was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.

Early life and education

Temin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish parents, Annette (Lehman), an activist, and Henry Temin, an attorney. As a high school student at Central High School in Philadelphia, he participated in the Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor, Maine. The director of the program, C.C. Little, told his parents that Temin was "unquestionably the finest scientist of the fifty-seven students who have attended the program since the beginning...I can't help but feel this boy is destined to become a really great man in the field of science." Temin said that his experience at the Jackson Laboratory is what originally interested him in science.

Temin's parents raised their family to have values associated with social justice and independent thinking, which was evident throughout his life. For Temin's bar mitzvah, the family donated money that would have been spent on the party to a local camp for displaced persons. Temin was also the valedictorian of his class and he devoted his speech to relevant issues at the time including the recent hydrogen bomb activity and the news of sending a man to the moon.

Temin received a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1955 majoring and minoring in biology in the honors program.

Career and research

Temin's first exposure to experimental science was during his time at the California Institute of Technology as a graduate student in laboratory of Professor Renato Dulbecco. Temin originally studied embryology at Caltech, but after about a year and a half, he switched to animal virology. He became interested Dulbecco's lab after a chance run-in with Harry Rubin, a postdoctoral fellow in Dulbecco's lab. In the lab, Temin studied the Rous sarcoma virus, a tumor-causing virus that infects chickens. During his research on the virus, he observed that mutations in the virus yielded alterations in the structural characteristics of the infected cell – thus, integration into the cell's genome was occurring. As part of his doctoral thesis, Temin stated that the Rous Sarcoma Virus has "some kind of close relationship with the genome of the infected cell". Following receiving his doctorate, Temin continued to work in Dulbecco's lab as a postdoctoral fellow.

In 1960, the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recruited Temin as a virologist; a position that had been hard to fill because, at the time, virology was not considered pertinent to cancer research.

Life and career post-Nobel Prize

After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1975, Temin went from a rebel in the scientific community to a highly respected researcher. Temin began receiving international recognition for his work, and used his newly acquired fame to improve the world. An example of this was in October 1976; Temin helped scientists in the Soviet Union that were targeted by the KGB, the secret police in the Soviet Union. The Jewish Soviet scientists had been stripped of their jobs and oppressed after requesting visas to emigrate to Israel. Temin made it his mission to personally visit the scientists and their families. He gave them gifts that could be resold to help them financially, and he gave the scientists copies of scientific journals, which had been banned by the KGB. On one occasion, Howard Temin gave a lecture to some of the Jewish Soviet scientists in someone's home. The next morning, almost all of scientists that had attended the lecture were arrested. After they were released, Temin tape-recorded one of the scientist's account of the event and gave the tape to newspapers in the United States so that the situation that Jewish scientists were facing would be publicized.

Another example of Temin trying to improve the world was at the Nobel Prize reception.

Death and legacy

Temin taught and conducted research at UW-Madison until he died of lung cancer, on February 9, 1994. He was survived by his wife Rayla, a geneticist at UW-Madison, two daughters, and two brothers, Peter Temin, also an academic, and Michael Temin, a lawyer.