Spiral

“Bastards,” Liam had said. “Willoughby. MacArthur. They wanted it, the Uzumaki. And they got it. Kept it secret all these years. Covered the whole thing up, right along with the atrocities at Unit 731. Now that pisspot at the NSA, Dunne, has Detrick working on it again.”

Liam had given him an ironic smile. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it? A little fungus, more dangerous than all the weapons once stored here, a little bit of growth you could carry in a thimble.”

Jake now stared out over the bunkers.

11

THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY RAN TO ALMOST A FULL PAGE.

LIAM CONNOR, RENOWNED BIOLOGIST,

ONE OF THE LAST LIVING FOUNDING FATHERS

OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, DIES AT 86

By Benjamin D. Ludgate

Liam Connor, Nobel laureate who unlocked the secrets of selective adaptation, died Tuesday morning in Ithaca, New York. His death was announced at Cornell University, where he worked and taught for sixty years. His body was found at the bottom of a gorge on campus. The circumstances of his death are under investigation.

A contemporary of James Watson and Francis Crick, the scientists who revealed the structure of DNA, Connor was best known for his work on mobile genetic elements, and for establishing that DNA resided not only in the nucleus but also in various other compartments in the cell. These ideas revolutionized cell and evolutionary biology.

Liam Connor was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1924, the sixth child in a shopkeeper’s family. As a young boy, he was fascinated by plants and fungi, and he developed an encyclopedic library of these organisms based on his own classification system. When he was fourteen, his father took him to University College Cork (then Queen’s College), where he studied under the tutelage of Professor Seamus Bailey. Within a few years, he was considered the most promising young biologist in the country. In 1943 he married Edith Somerville, a poet and essayist to whom he would remain married until her death in 2004.

In 1942, Liam Connor enlisted in the British Army. For four years he served at Porton Down, the British chemical and biological weapons center, working on countermeasures to potential Axis weapons, including a brief period in Japan after the end of the war. In 1946, Connor emigrated to the U.S., spending three years doing classified work at Camp Detrick (later Fort Detrick) in Frederick, Maryland, on biological weapons countermeasures.

He moved to Cornell University in 1950, taking a faculty position in the College of Agriculture. He first embarked on a fungal taxonomy project, creating what would become the 400,000-specimen Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, a collection now managed by his granddaughter, Margaret Connor. Throughout his life, he would continue to travel the globe, looking for specimens for the herbarium, especially those from northeastern China and South America.

In the early fifties, he had his first major breakthrough. Building on the work of Barbara McClintock, he studied transposons, sections of the genetic code that could move around within the genome. Connor showed that these transposons could turn genes on and off, and correctly postulated that retroviruses were specialized forms of transposons. Even more revolutionary were his experiments on endosymbiosis, an idea first proposed by the Russian botanist Konstantin Merezhkovsky in 1909. Connor, together with biologist Lynn Margulis, showed that key cell components such as mitochondria were originally bacteria that were engulfed by the host cell. Controversial when it was proposed, endosymbiosis is now accepted as a major cornerstone in the evolution of complex organisms.

Connor was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1960 and was awarded the Wolf Prize in 1972, the National Medal of Science in 1978, and (with Barbara McClintock) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. He received honorary doctoral degrees from seventeen institutions worldwide, including Queen’s College, Beijing University, and the University of Chicago. He was voted one of the ten most influential biologists of the twentieth century by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to his academic duties, Connor was a founding member of JASON, an academic think tank providing classified advice to the FBI, the CIA, and the military. Said John Rand, assistant secretary of state in the Nixon administration, “Connor was the one. He convinced Nixon to renounce offensive biological weapons in 1969.” He was also a major force behind the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Connor remained active on the issue, arguing vociferously against the buildup of the U.S. defensive bioweapons program over the last few years.