Howard Martin Temin

Howard Martin Temin married Rayla Greenberg, a medical geneticist, in 1962 and had two children.

He was a non-smoker and a vocal crusader against cigarettes. Ironically he became ill with adenocarcinoma, a type of lung cancer that is not linked to smoking. He remained active for as long as his health allowed him to, and breathed his last on February 9, 1994.

A walking path along Lake Mendota at UW–Madison was renamed the Howard M. Temin Path in his honor in 1998.

Howard Martin Temin was born in Philadelphia on December 10, 1934, to Jewish parents. His mother, Annette Lehman, was an activist who was often involved in educational affairs and his father, Henry Temin, was an attorney. Howard had two brothers.

While he was a student at Central High School in Pennsylvania, he participated in the Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor where he displayed an extraordinary aptitude for science. He also spent a summer at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia.

He joined the Swarthmore College in 1951 and graduated in 1955 with a bachelor's degree, majoring and minoring in biology in the honors program. He then proceeded to study experimental embryology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. After several months he changed his major to animal virology, becoming a graduate student in the laboratory of Professor Renato Dulbecco.

At the institute he was greatly influenced by Professor Max Delbrück and by Dr. Matthew Meselson. Temin earned his Ph.D. degree in animal virology in 1959 and spent an addition year in Professor Dulbecco's laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow.

He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1960. It was here that he began working on the ground breaking research that led to his formulating the DNA provirus hypothesis.

Over the ensuing years he rose through the ranks, successively becoming Associate Professor, Full Professor, and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Professor of Cancer Research. He was made the American Cancer Society Professor of Viral Oncology and Cell Biology in 1974.

During the 1960s, he focused on studying the Rous sarcoma virus. His investigations on the control of multiplication of uninfected and Rous sarcoma virus-infected cells in culture led him to the discovery of reverse transcriptase (RT)—the enzyme used to generate complementary DNA (cDNA) from an RNA template.

Initially his discovery was criticized by prominent scientists as the idea of RT contradicted the central dogma of molecular biology which states that DNA is transcribed into RNA which is then translated into proteins. At around the same time, another scientist, David Baltimore, independently isolated RT from two RNA tumor viruses and the concept of RT began to gain acceptance.

For his discoveries Temin won a share of the 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. His elevated stature as an internationally respected scientist motivated him to become more active in scientific community outside of research.

Temin independently discovered reverse transcriptase which is an enzyme used to generate complementary DNA (cDNA) from an RNA template through a process termed as reverse transcription. He initially faced much criticism for his idea of reverse transcription as it contradicted the central dogma of molecular biology. With time he gained recognition for this vital discovery which is today of tremendous significance to medical research.