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Obituary
Charles M. Steinberg (193299)
On 17 September, Charley Steinberg died in Basel, Switzerland, of leukaemia that developed after a long-drawn-out illness. His name is not in the usual list of Heroes of the Molecular Biological Revolution, but to those who were fortunate enough to have come under his spell he was perhaps the supreme master of them all. Indeed, it is a sign of his special kind of mastery that he does not figure in the list.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Steinberg graduated from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, in 1954. He was then drawn to Caltech by Max Delbrck (who, having himself worked at Vanderbilt during the Second World War, used to claim that Steinberg was the best thing ever to have come out of that university). During the next few years, the biology department at Caltech was the home for an astonishing array of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows Edgar and Epstein, Streisinger, Meselson and Stahl, Drake, Rubin and Temin, and many others, all of whom were to make major contributions to the foundations of molecular genetics. But each would surely have agreed that Steinberg was the intellectual giant in their midst. Indeed when the physicist Richard Feynman decided that, for a while, he would try his hand at biology, he chose Steinberg (still a graduate student) to be his tutor and supervisor.
During those years at Caltech, Steinberg played a central role in two important acts of clarification. Certain bacteriophages had been shown to undergo...