From bacteria to humans: lessons learned from a reductionist's view of ultraviolet light-induced DNA lesions.

What follows is a personal remembrance of how Dr. Richard Setlow influenced me as a young postdoctoral fellow at Oak Ridge National laboratory between 1963 and 1966. The narrative tries to place my "maturation" as a young, inexperienced scientist in the context of the cultural upheaval caused by the Vietnam war, of a Northerner facing a "culture-shock" living in the South and in a revolution in molecular and radiation biology taking place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory at that time. The unique historic juxtaposition of Dr. Setlow's contribution of the discovery of UV-induced pyrimidine dimers in bacterial DNA, being potentially the molecular lesion responsible for cell killing and mutagenesis, occurring as I was at Oak Ridge, and the wonderful working relationship I had with William Carrier, his technician, led to our discovery with James Regan that normal human cells repaired these lesion from their DNA. Amazingly, because of Dr. Setlow's challenge to me about my thoughts of the implications of his findings in bacteria, the chance visit to Oak Ridge National Laboratory by Dr. James Cleaver and my background as a human geneticist provided me the extraordinary opportunity to carry out a collaboration to test if human cancer prone syndromes might be deficient in the repair of these UV-induced DNA lesions. With our finding that the direct demonstration of a lack of repair of UV-induced pyrimidine dimers in cells from the skin cancer prone syndrome, xeroderma pigmentosum, opened up a new paradigm for the understanding of the molecular mechanism of carcinogenesis of both radiation and chemical carcinogenesis. From this investigator's vantage point in the history of the understanding of carcinogenesis, which has led us to the present point of "oncogenes" and "tumor suppressor genes", the old adage by Newton, "I only saw further because I stood on the shoulder of giants", is so applicable here. Dr. Setlow's shoulders were indeed among those of all of us that have made some small contribution in trying to understand this extremely complex process of human carcinogenesis.