NOBEL. Vom Fluss der Gene [Of the Flow of Genes]

Lucerne: Verlag Hans Erni-Stiftung, 1983. First edition.

SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY OF NOBELIST'S ARTISTIC SCIENTIFIC BOOK INSCRIBED TO COLLEAGUE.

9 1/2 inches tall hardcover, metallic paper-covered boards, image of dove on cover, inscribed and signed on front free endpaper, "Herzlich/ fur Gunther Stent/ Werner Arber, Dez 1983." 53 pp, illustrations. Very good in custom archival mylar cover.

WERNER ARBER (born 1929) is a Swiss microbiologist and geneticist. Along with American researchers Hamilton Smith and Daniel Nathans, Werner Arber shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction endonucleases. Their work would lead to the development of recombinant DNA technology. Arber received his doctorate in 1958 from the University of Geneva. He then worked at the University of Southern California in phage genetics with Gio Bertani after which accepted an offer to return to Geneva at the beginning of 1960. Arber notes that it was in 1963, while he was a researcher in Gunther Stent's Berkeley lab, when experiments produced the first evidence that modification in E. coli B and K is brought about by nucleotide methylation. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.

PROVENANCE: GUNTHER SIEGMUND STENT (1924 – 2008) was a graduate professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. An early bacteriophage biologist, he was known also for his studies on the metabolism of bacteria and neurobiology of leeches, and for his writing on the history and philosophy of biology. In 1949, Stent joined the so-called phage group that coalesced around Max Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. This was the incubator for many of the fundamental ideas of the newly emerging science of molecular biology. Informal discussions among these workers on the progress of their research led to a book by Stent, entitled Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses (dedicated to Delbrück), which was an account of the state of accomplishments in the field up to 1963.