Really, really, retro

I was looking up feline leukemia virus on the Virus Taxonomy site for a reason that I hopefully will be able to write about later. Then I started browsing through the whole retrovirus section and remembered that I had been going to look up reticuloendotheliosis virus (it's something chickens get, don't ask) 'cos I need to find out if it's piggybacking on our fowlpox or canarypox samples. Then I got totally sidetracked because I found this cool paper by some old guy narrating the history of the discovery of endogenous retroviruses.

Science history is more interesting to read if you're a science student, I think, because it gives you an idea of the significance of technologies and knowledge you take for granted:

So the next step was to collaborate with Jim Payne to determine whether Env complementation and Gag expression were inherited concomitantly. Using inbred chickens, F1 hybrids and back-crosses, we found that both phenotypes were indeed inherited according to Mendel's first law and that they segregated together as a single locus [27].

My first reaction to this paragraph was "Why the **** didn't they just extract DNA from the chickens and run PCR on it to see fi the gag and env genes were there???"

Then I remembered...oh yeah hor, last time no such thing as PCR.

Nonetheless, the evidence that we accrued in the pre-molecular era has stood the test of time, and our hypothesis on ERV, which one reviewer described as 'impossible', proved to be correct.

And it's really impressive how much discovery got done back before the molecular biology explosion...like McClintock and her discovery of transposons by looking at blobby lumps on chromosomes under a microscope.

Back then...men were real men, women were real women and small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri^*. Now we just buy reagents in kits and send our DNA samples off for sequencing and get a nice data file back.

*I think this is from Douglas Adams but I'm not sure.