Apparently one of the more mysterious items in the alt.folklore.urban FAQ is this one:
U. Filamentous phage M13 obtained from lab's letter rejecting the transfer!
The U means that the truth or falsehood is unknown. I gather that, never mind true or false, the legend that's being described here is mystifying enough. Here's the consensus version I've heard. (I've heard this several times, but never with much more detail than this, and never attached to any particular lab.)
In the early days of molecular biology - way back in the dark ages, maybe the early 1980's or even the 1970's (if you can believe it!) one of the most popular ways of manipulating DNA was to use viruses which infect the bacterium E. coli. These things - phages - contain DNA and infect bacteria, whereupon they replicate like mad, kill off the bacteria, and provide very high levels of their own DNA. You can tweak these guys to contain other DNA, and bingo: you've got large amounts of the DNA you're interested in. Very useful. They're less used now, as there are other methods for doing the same thing, but they're still pretty common. One such phage is M13. (According to the genetic map I have in front of me right now, it's a filamentous, male-specific, E. coli bacteriophage with a circular single-stranded DNA genome of 6407 bases. For those of you interested in molecular biology history, M13 is one of the bases from which the popular pUC series of plasmids was constructed by Messing et al.)
The story goes that scientist A. had published a paper on some particular DNA that he'd cloned into a phage. The accepted mores of science mean that, once the system was published, Dr A was obligated to provide the phage to anyone else interested in it; so Dr B wrote to him and asked for the DNA.
Dr A wrote back and gave some excuse - I've heard different versions, ranging from outright refusal to claiming he no longer had it - but anyway, did not provide the phage. Dr B looked at this refusal letter and reasoned that it had probably been written in Dr A's lab; and from that, he wondered if any phage had been floating around in the lab on the day A wrote the letter. Dr B soaked the letter in medium, added it to some bacteria, and lo and behold out grew a phage - which, sure enough, turned out to be the one Dr A supposedly didn't have.
So that's the story. It's classic UL material: a lovely moral, a nice plot twist, short and snappy. It's neither obviously false (the trick could be done) nor obviously true (I'd bet that 99% of the time, if you tried that, you'd come up empty). It's reasonably well-known among the geek crowd I hang out with.
Most of the people I've talked to only know the version I give above: let's call it the vanilla version. Last night, I went out with a bunch of friends, had a Vietnamese dinner that couldn't be beat, saw the Best of Spike and Mike's Animation festival, and got some more versions of this. The contributor (Paul) was formerly a professor at Harvard and now works in biotech. The first version he heard was in the spring of 1979, and he's heard two other versions since.
Pal's first version was rather different in that it wasn't M13, but was a phage of Corynebacterium parvum. (C. parvum is now reclassified as Propionibacterium acnes. I don't know a lot about it. Phages are used in studies of most bacteria, but not as a tool for DNA manipulation but rather for examining the bacterium.) He said that he heard it with a lot of detail, but (significantly) without any identification of the labs involved.
His second version was the vanilla one. The third took it out of science altogether and into beer (not that the two are entirely unconnected): it involved a brewer writing to a commercial brewery and asking for their yeast strain, getting a refusal letter and you know the rest.
A fourth version was provided a while ago by Yetanotherpaul. Paul Tomblin had heard the M13 version with a twist: in his, Scientist A wanted to give the phage to B, but lawyers were involved and refused to allow it. Dr A wrote a regretful refusal to B, but hinted between the lines that the phage was in the letter and B caught on. In this version, the moral is still there but is pointed at the lawyers instead of the scientists, which changes the flavour quite a bit. There's also a new conspiracy element which wasn't in any other version I've heard.
However, this version is reminiscent of something Jan Harold Brunvand talks about in Curses! Broiled Again! (ISBN 0-393-30711-5, WW Norton, New York, 1989) - pp 73-75 in my paperbound version: The Message Under The Stamp.
... In 1943, his [Brunvand's correspondent] recounted in a letter a story that was going around about another sailor stationed in the Pacific.Brunvand points out a bunch of things showing that the first version is clearly nonsense, and Cobb clearly didn't believe the second (civilian) version.
...after a time, his letters stopped arriving.
His mother was distraught. And she was well-nigh inconsolable after Navy authorities contacted her and reported that her son had been taken prisoner by the enemy.
The mother eventually received a letter from her son. He was confined to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he said, but he was safe and was being treated well.
When the mother steamed off the stamp, though, she found a hidden message from him: "They've cut off my hands!"
... [another version about the Gestapo having cut off the prisoner's hands.]
I've heard versions of the story that try to explain what led the mother to remove the stamp. In these versions, the son suggests in his letter that she should steam off the stamp for "little Alf" or "little Johnny" to add to his collection. But there is no little Alf or Johnny in the family. Nor are there any stamp collectors. The mother finally realizes this is a clue and steams the stamp off the envelope, finding the message.
Given its wartime setting, it's not surprising that one variation pushes the origin of the story back from the Second World War to the First.
In his autobiography _Exit Laughing, publishes in 1941, Irwin S. Cobb describes a "sad little tale whish sprang up 24 years ago and now is enjoying a popular revival. It's the heart-moving one about the German housewife who writes a letter to her kinfolks in America that everything is just dandy [soaks off stamp and] underneath are the words "We are starving." I don't know how we'd get along without that standby every time was breaks out in Europe," Cobb adds.
The secret hidden in the letter, and especially the hint by which the sender points to the secret, sound a lot like the phage (remember the phage? This here's a post about phages) story. If so, then this relatively recent science geek legend has antecedents going back at least 80 years.
Here's an addendum that was posted to alt.folklore.urban:
From: kurtzdt (at) musc.edu (dtk)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.science
Subject: more on the phage UL
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 19:38:01 +1200
I was surprised to see this as a UL involving M13, which wasn't really used very much until the very late 70's.
To show you how old this story is, I first heard it in the early 70's referring to an incident that (supposedly) occurred in the late 50's-early 60's.
While I was at Columbia U. at an institute headed by the late Sol Spiegelman, the legend was that HE (Spiegelman) had done this to Josh Lederberg; i.e. requested a phage, (probably of the T-even series or lambda), received a letter of refusal, and then, as the story went, "Sol cultured the letter".
The only things that made it believable at the time were:
1. Spiegelman never denied it (he would just smile if you mentioned it)
2. He was just a crafty enough little SOB to think of it (and do it)
3. He and Lederberg never got alongI don't mean to imply that just because Spiegelman never denied it, that it was probably true--he was the kind of guy that would like you to THINK he would do something like that.
And yet more versions! --these from Craig Smibert:
I talked to Paul (my boss) about your phage legend. Even before I got the story out of my mouth he knew what I was talking about. He said it happened in the 60's and that he didn't know who was refusing to give out the virus. However, he did say that he's pretty sure that Sidney Brenner once told him that he was the guy who did the eluting of the virus from the rejection letter. Also Paul has some recollection that this incident was document in some book somewhere but he can't remember where.I asked Alan Campbell about it also. He is one of the grand old men of phage biology. He did not know the eluter but he did know (albeit second hand) that it was Norton Zinder who was not sending out the phage. It seems that he was the first isolator of an RNA phage (f2 I think) but he wasn't giving it out to anybody.
While we were sitting around the lunchroom one day, this story spontaneously appeared, so I quizzed my labmates and got several new variants:
Here's a different version; it's cDNA this time, not virus. Yan heard this version around 1994/95; the story was set twenty or thirty years ago. The requester asked for a new gene in a plasmid; the person he was asking was at U Chicago (the person who told Yan about this was at U Chicago, though after this putative event, which would have made the event in the 1960s). The guy made "tons of excuses, saying I just can't give it to you;" the guy received the letter and shredded the paper, soaked it in water, extracted the water and used the water to transform bacteria, and got the plasmid.
Slight variation Yan heard--the guy used PCR to pull it out of the letter. This makes it a much more modern version.
One friend, who doesn't want her name used, heard a variant; the guy who refused to send it out got suckered. The requester sent his letter saying "If you won't send the plasmid then sign here". The refuser WORE GLOVES so that he wouldn't contaminate the paper(!) but the plasmid was in the signature (!!) and got eluted, just as the requester had planned. She heard this version in the mid-1990s, from a certain Nobel Laureate who will also remain nameless.
A footnote on the Bacteriophage Ecology Group (BEG) News page says:
Knowledge of phage T1Ős desiccation resistance likely forms the basis of the famous "Phage in a Letter" urban legend, which apparently has since morphed into "Phage M13 in a letter." M13 is also a desiccation-resistant phage, but one which few have rejected from their laboratories perhaps because M13 is relatively avirulent and otherwise popular as a platform for protein display.
If you've heard a version of this story, or if you have any corrections or additions, please let me know.