Mutation as cellular process : a Ciba Foundation symposium / edited by G.E.W. Wolstenholme and Maeve O'Connor.

  • Symposium on Mutation as Cellular Process (1969 : London, England)
Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Mutation as cellular process : a Ciba Foundation symposium / edited by G.E.W. Wolstenholme and Maeve O'Connor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHAIRMAN'S OPENING REMARKS R. F. Kimball As you all know, this symposium was initiated by Professor Charlotte Auerbach. Its subject reflects her view that mutation is not just an isolated event, a quantum event, or a simple chemical reaction, but a process in which cellular functions are intimately involved. This view I share, and therefore it is a pleasure and an honour for me to be asked to chair this symposium. This is not to say that quantum events and simple chemical reactions are not the starting points of processes leading to mutation. Most of us, however, work with cellular systems and here we cannot forget that the mutagenic treatments we give initiate a process which only after an appreciable time results in our detection of mutations. Cellular metabohsm and cellular events are intimately involved in this process. The two points of view, mutation as a simple molecular event and as a more complex cellular process, have been in existence for a long time and attention has shifted back and forth between them. Concentration on the initial atomic and molecular event leads to a certain simplicity that is especially attractive to those who come to the problem from physics and chemistry. Concentration on the cellular process aspect is more congenial to those of us who come to the problem from biology and are more immediately aware of the complexities of biological systems. Here we must be very careful, however, that this awareness of complexity is not converted to a worship of it and a consequent resistance to the attempt to analyse the problem and reduce it to simpler levels. It is just this analysis and reduction that should be one of the main purposes of this symposium. Let me start with a very crude overall view of mutation as a cellular process. We can recognize at least the following main steps: (i) initiation, (2) fixation, (3) detection. With many mutagens, initiation necessitates molecular alteration of the chromosome. In general, however, this altera¬ tion—an alkylated base for example—will not itself be self-replicating but must be converted to some self-replicating change, such as a base-pair transition. There are many possible variations of these first two steps. In some variations, such as a spontaneous mistake by the rephcating system, I