Word: coded
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...image suggested that DNA had a regular crystalline structure. By figuring out what that structure is, moreover, one might be in a better position to understand how genes work. Here was someone who appreciated what Watson already believed but which many scientists didn't yet accept: that the genetic code was somehow tied up in the physical structure of DNA. He realized he needed to understand X-ray diffraction and wanted to join Wilkins in London but never got an opportunity to ask him. So Watson wangled the next best position--a fellowship at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where...
Impressed by these arguments, Watson switched from birds to genetics and went to Indiana University in 1947 to study viruses, the simplest form of life on the planet and thus the one in which the code might be especially easy to find. By then, scientists had strong evidence that Schrodinger's genetic code was carried by DNA, thanks to a series of brilliant experiments on pneumococcal bacteria, first by Fred Griffith of the British Health Ministry and later by Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City...
...were the two backbones on the inside of DNA or on the outside? Inside was a lot more straightforward; with the attached bases pointing outward, whatever code they might carry would be easily accessible. There seemed no chemically viable way to parse it, however, although Watson spent several days trying. Finally, he writes, "as I took apart a particularly repulsive backbone-centered molecule, I decided that no harm could come from spending a few days building backbone-out models." This would raise the tricky question of how to pack strings of bases against one another. But Watson put aside that...
George Gamow suggests that DNA holds the code for making proteins...
Crick's ideas on the origins of life are no less provocative. Concluding that conditions on the young Earth were far from favorable for the spontaneous generation of lifelike organisms, and trying to explain why the genetic code is the same in all earthly creatures, he and Orgel revived a theory known as panspermia ("seeds everywhere"). In their version, called directed panspermia, a distant civilization arising long ago on a planet where conditions were benign, sent unmanned rocket ships to seed the primitive earth's oceans with sporelike organisms that multiplied and evolved...