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This chapter shows Ole Maaloe heading full-speed into a study of bacteriophages, that is, viruses that infect and replicate in bacterial cells, while Niels Jerne was beginning to identify himself as an immunologist. Max Delbruck and other geneticists used the tiny phage as a model organism to understand the molecular mechanism of heredity, and during his stay at Cal Tech in the spring of 1949, Maaloe had been seriously bitten by the “phage bug.” He returned to Copenhagen full of energy and ideas and, with Orskov's indulgence, established his one-man branch of the internationally dispersed phage group in the Standardization Department. The following spring he started a series of experiments on how changes in temperature affect the reproduction of phages in the bacterial cell.

This chapter describes the arrival of a new research fellow in the Standardization Department from the new world. Twenty-two-year-old Karl Gordon Lark had just completed his Ph.D. with one of America's leading immunologists, Alwin Pappenheimer, at New York University. A couple of years earlier, Lark had attended the bacteriophage course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and had met Ole Maaloe, who had told him that Copenhagen was a nice place to in which to spend a couple of years if one had a Rockefeller fellowship in one's pocket. Lark arrived at an auspicious time. Maaloe had left his studies of bacteriophage in favor of the host cell and, inspired by recently published studies of phases in the division of eukaryotic cells, had decided to explore the synthesis of DNA during the division of bacterial cells, something that required access to a bacterial colony in which all the cells divided synchronously.

This chapter focuses on the time the phage group was dissolved. James Watson left for Cambridge and the Cavendish Laboratory, where he was going to meet Francis Crick and begin the work that would lead to the elucidation of the double helix structure of DNA; Gunther Stent left for Paris with an Icelandic woman he had met at the Serum Institute to work with Andre Lwoff at the Pasteur Institute; and finally, Ole Maaloe departed to California for a year to deepen his insights into the physiology of bacteria with Cornelius van Niel at Hopkins Marine Station. Niels Jerne was left solely responsible for the work of the department. In his letters to Maaloe during the following months, he complained regularly that the obligatory international standardization work took too much of his time.