Light cast on a darkling gene - retinoblastoma

Once the the gene was detected, Friend's next challenge was to clone it -- that is, to transplant it into a permanently culturable cell line where it could be produced in larg- er quantities. Never having cloned a gene before, and knowing that other researchers were snapping at his heels, he consulted another Weinberg post-doc, Snezna Rogelj. She set aside all her experiments and took him through the procedure step by baby-step. They hadn't a moment to waste. Ro- gelj wanted to make sure that Friend got everything perfect the first time, because one stumble could ruin all the cloning reactions. Says she, ''It was like teaching a hemophiliac to ride a bicycle.''

At that point, the energy in the Weinberg lab was thermonuclear.Everybody realized that Friend was on to something big, and Friend himself was working 15 hours a day, seven days a week. By May, Friend thought he had cloned the gene. Weinberg was trying to keep the news quiet until the lab had gathered sufficient proof, but word began to get out. Biologists bombarded

Weinberg with telephone calls.

Whenever a Weinberg re- searcher attended a conference, other scientists would corner him and try to squeeze out information. Benedict kept calling from California to check on Friend's progress. Friend would be in the middle of a critical experiment and drop everything to answer the phone, only to hear his rival at the other end. Although Friend was as polite as ever, he cagily resisted answering Benedict's questions. ''Benedict was,'' says Friend, ''a very persistent man.''

By summer Friend had magnificent evidence that his cloned gene was the right one. He had found two patients -- one with osteosarcoma, the other with retinoblastoma -- whose 13th chromosomes were normal except that both lacked a small part that fell smack within the confines of the cloned gene.

Friend, Dryja, and Weinberg wrote a report on the ret inoblastoma gene and, in August, dashed it off to Nature, the respected British scientific journal, with a request from Weinberg that it be published as a lengthy article -- as befitted a major breakthrough. ''I thought it was the least we deserved,'' he says.

The editors of Nature, however, had other ideas. They coolly informed Weinberg that the retinoblastoma paper would appear among the ''Letters to Nature'' in the back pages. ''That was one of the nuttiest things I ever heard,'' says Wigler. ''You begin to wonder if these British guys aren't taking their native eccentricities a little too far.'' Worse, the editors said the journal couldn't possibly squeeze the paper in until October at the earliest.

In the intervening weeks Dryja got some bad news. It seemed thateither Benedict or Lee, who now had his own lab at the University of California in San Diego, might also have cloned the gene. Neither was about to confess whether the gossip was true. Frantic lest one or the other ram a paper into another scientific journal before his report came out, Weinberg called Nature and pleaded for a speedy review process. The editors repeated that, review process or no, the paper wouldn't be published until October. ''Everybody around here is so depressed,'' Bernards groaned in September. ''We're really worried that we'll get beaten after all.'' But it was a false alarm. Despite committing dozens of people to the time-consuming gene-walking approach, Benedict and Lee were still weeks from reaching the goal.