1910

Peyton Rous, at Rockefeller Institute, demonstrates cancer in chickens could be caused by a virus, soon named the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) (Mukherjee, 342). In 1970, Howard Temin presented his finding that RSV was no ordinary virus, but a retrovirus that could write genetic information backward, RNA  DNA, i.e., RNA could generate DNA; a cancer-causing virus’s genome could become a physical part of a cell’s genes (350-356).