Nicholas R. Cozzarelli

Francis Crick wrote in his book What Mad Pursuit:

At about this time, Bill Pohl, a pure mathematician, got into the act. He pointed out, quite correctly, that unless something very special happened, the most likely result of replicating a piece of circular DNA would be two interlocked daughter circles rather than two separate ones. From this he deduced that the DNA chains could not be intertwined, as we had suggested, but had to lie side by side. I corresponded at some length with him as well as talking with him on the phone. Later on he paid me a visit. He had become very well informed about experimental details and persisted strongly in his view. I told him in a letter that if nature did occasionally produce two interlocked circles, a special mechanism would have been evolved to unlink them. I believe he thought this was an outrageous example of special pleading and was not at all convinced by it. It turned out, some years later, that this is exactly what does happen. Nick Cozzarelli and his co-workers showed that a special enzyme, called topoisomerase II, can cut both strands of a piece of DNA, pass another piece of DNA between the two ends, and then join the broken ends together again. It can thus unlink two linked DNA circles, and can even, at high enough concentrations of DNA, produce linked circles of DNA from separate ones.[6]

Cozzarelli was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1989.[7] The Cozzarelli Prize is named in his honor.[8]