Temin, Howard Martin (1934–1994)

US virologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975 for work on the interactions between tumour-inducing viruses and the genetic material of the cell. He shared the prize with David Baltimore and Renato Dulbecco.

Temin was born in Philadelphia and educated at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and the California Institute of Technology. From 1960 he worked at the University of Wisconsin, becoming professor in 1969.

Temin's prize-winning research was on a virus that has a mechanism that incorporates its material into mammalian genes. He discovered that beneficial mutations outside the germ line are naturally selected and that the mechanism adds genetic information from outside into the germ line.