59: Don't Shoot the Messenger
In this episode, we talk about the mostly-forgotten OTHER nucleic acid, RNA, and the history of its discovery. Along the way we encounter Jean Brachet, who discovered the first physiological difference from DNA: it was in the cell cytoplasm. Soon thereafter, Nazi-funded Joachim Hämmerling found that the cell nucleus had genetic information, which ruled out RNA. We take a curve into the new information theory and computers, and maybe how genetic information was coded into DNA. We end up with Kenneth McQuillen and the role of ribosomes in the late 1950s. Only then was RNA finally understood in its biochemical role.
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