The cell biologist Henry Harris, who has died aged 89, made the key discovery that the inactivated form of a virus responsible for a respiratory tract infection in mice could fuse cells together very efficiently, even when they differed widely in type and species of origin. He showed that this remarkable finding could be exploited to reveal how the expression of genes was controlled, how they could be assigned to specific chromosomes and, of central interest to his later research, that some could suppress the growth of cancer cells.
Fusion produces either single large nondividing cells containing multiple separate nuclei of each type or, most interestingly, hybrid cells in which all genes of the participants are encompassed within a single common nucleus. The hybrids are of particular value in showing sustained growth and division, and in tending to shed chromosomes more or less at random. In elegant experiments in which he made such hybrids between cancer cells and their normal counterparts, Henry found that malignancy was consistently suppressed, only to re-emerge later among some of the descendants of the hybrid cells.
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