| In the years
after 1953, scientists scrambled to be the first
to decipher the genetic code. In an attempt to make
the race interesting, theoretical physicist and
astronomer George Gamow came up with a plan. He
organized an exclusive club, the “RNA Tie
Club,” in which each member would put forward
ideas as to how the nucleotide
bases were translated
into
proteins in the body's cells. His club
had twenty hand-picked members, one for each
amino acid, and each wore a tie marked with the symbol
of that amino acid. The group—which did not include Marshall Nirenberg—met several times
during the 1950s but did not manage to be the first
to break the code.
The scientists who pondered the mystery of the genetic code in the late 1950s came up with many creative theories. One main
problem to work out was how many bases would
be in each code word (later known as a
codon).
They knew there was a total of four bases (guanine,
cytosine, adenine, and thymine). So if there
were two bases in each codon, then there would
only be the possibility of (4 x 4) sixteen unique
combinations of bases, or sixteen amino acids.
But there were 20 known amino acids. So most
assumed there would be at least three bases
in each codon, providing (4 x 4 x 4) 64 possible
combinations. However, despite all the scientists working on the problem, in 1961 the basic
mystery remained: which series of bases specified
which amino acids? What, in fact, was the
genetic code? |
