Cairns, Hugh John Forster (1922- )

English virologist whose research has focused on cancer and influenza. In 1959 he succeeded in carrying out genetic mapping of an animal virus for the first time.

Career Cairns was born in Oxford and studied medicine there. He worked at the Viruses Research Institute, Entebbe, Uganda, 1951-63 and was director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology in New York 1963-68. He then took professorships at the State University of New York and with the American Cancer Society. From 1973 to 1981 he was in charge of the Mill Hill laboratories of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London. In 1982 he moved to the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA.

Influenza The influenza virus, Cairns discovered 1952-53, is not released from the infected cell in a burst but in a slow trickle, and is completed as it is released through the cell surface.

DNA Comparing the rates of replication of DNA in mammals with those in the bacterium Escherichia coli, he found that mammalian DNA is replicated more slowly than that of E. coli, but is replicated simultaneously at many points.

Cairns's later work studied the link between DNA and cancer, some forms of which may be caused by the alkylation of bases in the DNA. He showed that bacteria are able to inhibit the alkylation mechanism in their own cells, and later demonstrated this ability in mammalian cells. In 1960 he showed that the DNA of the vaccinia virus is replicated in the cytoplasm or protoplasm of the cell (excluding the nucleus) and that each infecting virus particle creates a separate DNA ‘factory’.