Life's Greatest Secret

by Matthew Cobb

  Transcription factor. RNA or protein molecule that binds to a particular DNA sequence and regulates the activity of a gene.

  Translation. The process whereby the genetic message in RNA is turned into an amino acid sequence; part of the protein synthesis process.

  tRNA. Transfer RNA. Small cloverleaf-shaped piece of RNA, predicted to exist by Crick and Brenner. Each tRNA attaches to a particular amino acid and also carries an anticodon that enables it to bind with the relevant codon on the mRNA molecule.

  UGA. The final word (or codon) in the genetic code to be deciphered, in 1967. Known as the opal codon, this mRNA sequence instructs the cell’s protein synthesis machinery to ‘stop here’.

  FURTHER READING

  Some of the research articles cited here are available as open access articles on the Internet; sadly, that is not true of all of them. You can generally find at least the abstract or summary of the article on line by putting its title into a search engine. Archival material covering the life and work of Avery, Crick, Nirenberg and others is available at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov. The Wellcome Trust Codebreakers web site also holds many original documents: http://wellcomelibrary.org/using-the-library/subject-guides/genetics/makers-of-modern-genetics. Many informal photos of the key figures in this story can be found at http://www.estherlederberg.com.

  Several academic works cover the material presented here and provide excellent additional sources: Lily E. Kay’s Who Wrote the Book of Life?, Evelyn Fox Keller’s Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology, The Century of the Gene and Making Sense of Life, and the articles and chapters by Sahotra Sarkar (see the reference list). Michel Morange’s A History of Molecular Biology provides the scientific context (declaration: I translated it; a second edition is apparently in the works), while H. Freeman Judson has written a huge and fascinating oral history of the subject The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. If you want to explore the history of information without much mathematics, James Gleick’s The Information is for you, while for those interested in the scientific importance of metaphors, Theodore Brown’s readable Making Truth: Metaphor in Science is a great place to start. Above all, I recommend reading the memoirs of four of the central people involved in this work: the inevitable The Double Helix by James Watson, Francis Crick’s What Mad Pursuit, Maclyn McCarty’s account of work in the Avery lab, The Transforming Principle, and François Jacob’s marvellous but little-known The Statue Within.

  If you want to know what happened before this story begins, you should read my earlier book, The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth (published in the US as Generation).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book owes a debt to the scholarship of the late Lily E. Kay, whose Who Wrote the Book of Life? provided me with inspiration and acted as a pathfinder. As the dedication indicates, my friend and colleague Professor John Pickstone died before he could subject the manuscript to his incisive criticism. We talked about the book several times over coffee or a pint as I was planning and writing it, and John’s insight and good humour always cheered and helped me.

  My agent, Peter Tallack, and my London publisher, John Davey, were enthusiastic and attentive during the pitching and the writing, respectively. John’s careful edits have improved the manuscript no end, and at his suggestion we visited the King’s College Archive and were able to handle the camera that took the notorious photo 51 (see Chapter 6). Bruce Goatly edited the copy with great efficiency and also rescued me from some howlers that will remain our secret. Picture researcher Lesley Hodgson gathered the illustrations with aplomb. Penny Daniel ensured that the passage from manuscript to printed page went smoothly, and was tolerant of my changes to the proofs.

  My thanks go to my friends, colleagues, folk on Twitter and people whom I contacted out of the blue by e-mail, all of whom helped me in all sorts of ways, providing information, encouragement, articles, and in the case of Jerry Hurwitz an eye-witness account of the moment that Marshall Nirenberg told the world that the genetic code had been cracked: Tom Avery, Stuart Bennett, Casey Bergman, Sam Berry, Dave Briggs, Thony Christie, Dan Davis, Jerry Hurwitz, Nick Lane, Richard Lenski, Florian Maderspacher, Bjorn Poonen, Brian Sutton, Alex Wellerstein, Michael Wells and Vivian Wyatt. Alok Jha (then of The Guardian), Steve Mao of Cell and Geoff North of Current Biology were all generous enough to allow me to sketch out my ideas through articles in their publications. Jerry Coyne encouraged me to post material on http://whyevolutionistrue.com, and the readers’ comments helped me clarify my ideas. Similarly, the students on Carsten Timmerman’s University of Manchester course A History of Biology in 20 Objects have been guinea pigs for some of my arguments. When it came to reviewing the manuscript, Jerry Coyne, Stephen Curry, Larry Moran, Michel Morange, Adam Rutherford, Ulrich Stegmann and Leslie Vosshall all generously provided extremely useful comments on chapter drafts. The errors and omissions that remain are my fault, of course.

  While I wrote this book, my close family had to face a variety of life-changing events – PhD completion, university entry, major depression and vascular dementia. I am sure that when I was researching and writing, I was not as attentive to the needs of my loved ones as I ought to have been. My apologies to you all. Books have a price for writers’ families, too.

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