Teminism - In 1958 Crick proposed the central dogma of molecular biology:
However, in 1963 Temin reported that in some cancer viruses a reverse flow of genetic information takes place. Certain RNA tumour viruses synthesize DNA, which in turn codes for protein. Temin's hypothesis, put forward in 1964, is that in RNA tumour viruses RNA replicates through a DNA intermediate.
This was confirmed by the discovery of an enzyme which makes DNA from a RNA template. It was also found that if the RNA of the virus was destroyed by the enzyme RNase, then DNA synthesis was prevented. This suggests that RNA is acting as a template for DNA synthesis.
