Hugh John Forster CairnsFRS[3] (21 November 1922 – 12 November 2018) was a British physician and molecular biologist who made significant contributions to molecular genetics, cancer research, and public health.
In his 1963 paper "The bacterial chromosome and its manner of replication as seen by autoradiography", Cairns demonstrated by autoradiography that the DNA of the bacteriumEscherichia coli was a single molecule that is replicated at a moving locus (the replicating fork) at which both new DNA strands are being synthesized. Subsequently, it was found that there were in fact two moving forks, traveling simultaneously in opposite directions around the chromosome.
In 1974 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1981, John Cairns received a MacArthur Foundation ("genius") Fellowship. He is the author of the 1978 book Cancer: Science and Society (now out of print) and the 1997 book, Matters of Life and Death: Perspectives on Public Health, Molecular Biology, Cancer, and the Prospects for the Human Race.[4] Together with James Watson and Gunther Stent, Cairns also edited the collection of historical accounts Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology (1st edition, 1966; 2nd edition, 1992;[5] 3rd edition, 2007).[6]
^Livingston, Katherine (1992). "Review of Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, 2nd edition, edited by John Cairns, Gunther S. Stent, and James D. Watson". Science. 257 (5077): 1775. doi:10.1126/science.257.5077.1775.a. PMID17841182.