Rous sarcoma virus

…viruses—Rauscher murine leukemia virus and Rous sarcoma virus—to discover whether a similar enzyme was at work in their replication. It was through these experiments that he discovered reverse transcriptase. This discovery proved an exception to the “central dogma” of genetic theory, which states that the information encoded in genes always…

…Temin began investigating how the Rous sarcoma virus causes animal cancers. One puzzling observation was that the virus, the essential component of which is ribonucleic acid (RNA), could not infect the cell if the synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was stopped. Temin proposed in 1964 that the virus somehow translated…