Professor John Arthur Pateman FRS, never addressed in the lab by his first name, but as Dr. Pateman, and among students as “Jolly John”.
John Fincham and John Pateman published an article in Nature, “Formation of an Enzyme through complementation of mutant ‘alleles’ in separate nuclei in a heterocaryon”. The article concerned two different ‘alleles’ at the am locus of Neurospora crassa, which partially complemented in heterocaryons. It is worth citing the final sentence of that article, which followed the discussion and tentative rejection of other alternatives: “one can imagine that the wild type am locus acts as a unit in producing a single component of the enzyme-forming system, and that component can be partially reconstituted in the cytoplasm of the heterocaryons from two different nuclear products” (Fincham and Pateman, 1957; Pateman, 1960). The “partial reconstitution” of the enzyme activity is what we now call intracistronic or interallelic complementation.
The very same year, Norman Giles and co-workers described a similar phenomenon at the ad-4 locus, encoding adenylosuccinase. The final sentence of their article states “the present results appear to make more difficult the general application of the cis–trans position effect test to delimit a locus as a functional unit” (Giles et al., 1957). It is a sobering thought, that the same year that the gene was defined rigorously as a linear array of sites that when mutated do not complement with each other, this apparently flawless definition was questioned by work with N. crassa from two different laboratories. Of course, we now know, through the subsequent work of John Fincham and others what is going on.
Young scientists familiar with the term “dominant negative” can perhaps ponder that the latter is a particular case of the phenomenon first described in 1957, which reflects the fact that the genetic message is contained in one dimension, but proteins thrive in three.
John Pateman had a special relationship with Australia. He went from Sheffield, where in the lab of John Thoday he carried out his work on intracistronic complementation, to Melbourne as lecturer in Botany (1958–1960). In 1960 he moved to Cambridge as a lecturer in Genetics, and in 1966, as stated above, to Flinders. In 1970 he was appointed to the Chair of Genetics at Glasgow, appropriately, as a successor of Guido Pontecorvo. Eventually he moved back to Australia, to the Australian National University in Melbourne (1979–1988) as successor of Bill Hayes, and eventually as Executive Director of the Centre for Recombinant DNA Research. After retirement, he returned to the UK, living in Oxford.
Read his obituary from the journal Fungal Genetics and Biology
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