A Final Proof Of Our Ideas Can

It Is One Of The More Striking Generalizations Of Biochemistry - Which Surprisingly Is Hardly Ever Mentioned In The Biochemical Textbooks - That The Twenty Amino Acids And The Four Bases, Are, With Minor Reservations, The Same Throughout Nature.

There Is No Form Of Prose More Difficult To Understand And More Tedious To Read Than The Average Scientific Paper.

Haemoglobin Is A Very Large Molecule By Ordinary Standards, Containing About Ten Thousand Atoms, But The Chances Are That Your Haemoglobin And Mine Are Identical, And Significantly Different From That Of A Pig Or Horse. You May Be Impressed By How Much Human Beings Differ From One Another, But If You Were To Look Into The Fine Details Of The Molecules Of Which They Are Constructed, You Would Be Astonished By Their Similarity.

For Simplicity One Can Think Of The + Class As Having One Extra Base At Some Point Or Other In The Genetic Message And The - Class As Having One Too Few.

Finally One Should Add That In Spite Of The Great Complexity Of Protein Synthesis And In Spite Of The Considerable Technical Difficulties In Synthesizing Polynucleotides With Defined Sequences It Is Not Unreasonable To Hope That All These Points Will Be Clarified In The Near Future, And That The Genetic Code Will Be Completely Established On A Sound Experimental Basis Within A Few Years.