5.0 Anna Marie Skalka — Introduction, Session 5

Anna Marie Skalka: [00:00:00] I think a lot of people share my feeling that this has been a really phenomenal historical meeting. Like Jim Watson, I'm really struck a little bit by nostalgia because in a way it was the methods and principles established by our Cold Spring Harbor forefathers, our phage forefathers, that opened the door to the age of molecular biology as Jim [00:00:30] mentioned, and eventually, recombinant DNA technology in the late 1990s. Some pioneers of molecular retrovirology were actually children of the phage group. That experience informed their development of tools that facilitated the elucidation of the molecular aspects of retrovirus propagation.

[00:01:00] The early studies of the Rous sarcoma viruses and retroviruses that infect mice provided a clear outline of the steps required for retroviral propagation and identified the proteins, and most importantly, the enzymes that are shared by all of them, and as we heard that it's these enzymes that have become the primary targets for effective AIDS therapies.

In many ways, it's been the [00:01:30] variations on that general theme that have made molecular biology of HIV most extraordinary. As you'll hear in this session, discovery and characterization of a unique viral regulatory protein and elucidation of some other particular features of HIV and its interaction with its host cells taught us very much, not only about the biology of the virus, but also [00:02:00] of human biology and evolution. I'm like most of you looking forward to hearing the talks today, and we'll start with Flossie who'll tell us about transactivation.

[00:02:14] [END OF AUDIO]

Index

• 1.1 James D. Watson — Welcome
• 5.1 Flossie Wong-Staal — Discovery of Human Retroviral Transactivators
• bacteriophage
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL)
• memory
• murine leukemia virus (MLV)
• Rous sarcoma virus (RSV)
• transactivation