Howard Martin Temin was a U.S. geneticist and virologist. Howard Temin was born on December 10, 1934 in Philadelphia. In 1992 Temin received the National Medal of Science and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. While working toward his Ph.D. under Dulbecco at the California Institute of Technology, Temin began investigating how the Rous sarcoma virus causes animal cancers. One puzzling observation was that the virus, the essential component of which is ribonucleic acid (RNA), could not infect the cell if the synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was stopped. Temin proposed in 1964 that the virus somehow translated its RNA into DNA, which then redirected the reproductive activity of the cell, transforming it into a cancer cell. The cell would reproduce this DNA along with its own DNA, producing more cancer cells. He died on February 9, 1994 in Madison, Wisconsin, United States.