The Great Escape: Phage Lysis and Its Control

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) established the DeWitt Stetten Jr. Lecture in 1982 on the occasion of the institute’s 20th anniversary in honor of its third director, DeWitt “Hans” Stetten, Jr., M.D., Ph.D. Stetten was an esteemed biomedical research and administrator who had a varied biomedical career at and beyond the NIH. He first came to NIH in 1954 as associate director of intramural research at what was then called the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. Having made his imprint there, he left the NIH to serve as dean of the Rutgers University Medical School from 1962 to 1970. Then he returned to the NIH to become NIGMS director, where he was instrumental in shaping the modern successes of this institute. Among Stetten’s many accomplishments at NIGMS was the establishment of eight genetics centers across the United States that maintained a bank of cell lines representing genetic defects and sponsored basic and clinical programs for the identification of genetically transmitted diseases. He developed national guidelines for this genetic research, which was quite novel and exciting at the time. Stetten also was senior scientific adviser to the NIH director from 1979 to 1986. The NIH Stetten Museum(external link) was renamed in his honor in 1987.Young, Ph.D.(external link), is the director of the Texas A&M Center for Phage Technology(external link), a University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor and the Sadie Hatfield Professor of Agriculture in the Texas A&M Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics(external link).Over his 44-year career at the Texas A&M College of Medicine and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences(external link), Young has made broad advances in the understanding of bacteria-infecting viruses called bacteriophages, or phages. This work was performed in collaboration with many students and colleagues. Overall, Young’s work illuminated the ancient “arms race” between phages and bacteria and shed light on ways to combat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.Young earned his doctorate in molecular biology in 1975 as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the University of Texas at Dallas. He was a National Institutes of Health, NIH, Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he discovered a bacteriophage lambda gene involved in lysis. In 2003, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology and a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. He was named the Sadie Hatfield Professor of Agriculture in 2006, a Texas A&M Regents Professor in 2016 and a Texas A&M University Distinguished Professor in 2018.
For more information go to oir.nih.gov/wals