December, 24, 1961 INew H orisons in Science The Code of Life Finally Cracked In the mood of 1848 tranS- ferred to today, biologists and Bruecke and I have SWOrn chemists know the transfer iS to mfke the truth prevail: n0 chemical. They know that forces are elective in the when sperm `unites with egg, organism other than the purely physical-chemical -Emil Du chemicals are joined. When an Bois-Raymond, 1847. amoeba or a cell or a germ Eventually, physi0zogy must splits in two, chemicals are completely dtssolve into or- distributed. ganic physics and chemistry- It was only a few generations Emil Du Rois-Rey?nond, 1848. ago that biologists traced the . . . When Du Bois-Reymond Set site of those important chemi- those brave words down as a cals to the nucleus, the central thirty-year-old biologist in core of the cell; and in the nucleus to the chromosomes, Berlin more than a century ago, microscopic they seemed as revolutionary as rods the Communist Manifesto of Twenty. years &go they iden- those'same years. His call for tifled the chemical that carries a physical-chemical basis for the hereditary information-it life hammered at the prevailing was called deoxynucleic acid theory of vitalism: the "old (dee-OXY-NOO-KLEE-ik), and men" believed an unseen, im- known as DNA for short. The measurable vital force gave the past two decades have been spark to life. spent trying to understand its In typical revolutionary chemistry and its role in the fashion and in keeping with the hereditary mechanism' times, the young men in science Composed of two long strings rallied to the young Berliner's of four basic molecules, per- side. Bruecke muted thousands of times, the Bruecke, who lar befrzt DNA holds the `information for Sigmund Freud's physiology the .manufacture of proteins in teacher in Vienna. Hermann cells, The type and variety of von Helmholtz, then twenty- proteins make an animal the seven and a founder of .the slee, shape and color it is. The law of conservation of energy, proteins, composed of twenty different, aminoacids, carry on and Karl Ludwig, thirty-two, a the basic life chemistry.. physiologist, joined the fight. Of course, with their methods Still Unknown they failed to prove their But the biologists did not biological manifesto. know how the information from Last week another gray of the DNA moves from the w&a- xoung + .satakm6 of the.call into the pro- meii tein manufacturing region, the announced they had come closer th,an ever to Prov- cytoplasm, and into the ribo- .ing the Germans right. They some& the microscopic protein had tapped one of the inner- factories. Recently they found `most secrets of living things. the role of the transfer agent played bp another chemical, They had found the key to ribonucleic the chemical code of life: they acid (RYE-bo- NOO-KLEE-ik), a cousin to had learned the basic ichemical DNA and known &s RrJA language of heredity and of the living chemistry by which Unknown: What sequence of submolecules in RNA (as trans- protoplasm regenerates itself. f erred from the DNA) produced They had given more reason the proper sequence of amino than ever to believe that at acfds in the proteins? me bottom the life force is them- whole sequence of RNA sub- istry and physics. molecules-identified by letters Credit for the fundamental representing the 4 chemicals, crack in the code goes to Dr. O, C, U, A-is the language of Marshall W. Nirenberg, thirty- life; each three-letter combina- `two, of the National Institute tion is a "word." Each word- of Arthritis and Metabolic UUU, UAA, CUA, etc.-controls Diseases, Bethesda, Md. Work- the addition of a particular ing with Dr. J. Heinrich amino acid to a Particuiar pro- Ma'tthaei, Dr. Nirenberg six `tein. months ago deciphered the Arst Dr. Nirenberg fed artificial "word" of that code. R,NA to the ribosomes. This The News Leaks Out artificial RNA had but one word When Dr. Nirenberg an- -UUU-UUU-UUU-repeated nounced his achievement in over and over. The ribosomes Moscow at the International read the code and produced a Biochemical Congress last protein containing only one August, he set the world of amino acid, phenylalanine. This was the news last August in biochemistry abuzz. However, Moscow the news did not leak into the ' newspapers until last week. A The NYU group tried other group of four researchers from RNAs and worked out--with New York University announced some ambiguities still-the code words for fourteen of the twen- they had taken Dr. Nirenberg's ty amino acids. Dr. Nbenberg code-breaking procedure several has also done So steps further and deciphered fourteen out of twenty words Future Uses of the code of life, and had thus This work has great practical effectively broken it. implications. If biologists know After this announcement by the whole hereditary code and the NYU group headed by learn how to change it at will, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Servo they may be able to control Ochoa, Dr. Nirenberg's insti- heredity by chemical means. tute announced that he and They could raise plants and Dr. Matthaei had also de- animals of almost any desired ciphered as many words. At characte;, and do it in a hurry. week's end, it seemed it would In human beings, it could be only a, short time before the lead to control of hereditary full code was known, now that diseases like diabetes and gout, to name but two. Some scien- its basic Secret was revealed . tists are even worried that ib What is this code? What is could be applied to control the the "language" involved? What . t lli in e gence of large human are the "words?" These are populations wholesale; i. e.. but metaphorical ways of ex- breed a super-race. But all this pressing the great modern is in the distant future. question in biology: how does a At the moment, the biological living thing transmit its char- manifesto of 1848 looks very scteristie to its offspring? good indeed.