SUPPLEMENT IX 



James D.Watson 

 The involvement of RNA in the synthesis of proteins 



Nobel Lecture, December 11, ig62 



Prologue 



I arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 195 1. Though my previous interests 

 were largely genetic, Luria had arranged for me to work with John Kendrcw. 

 I was becoming frustrated with phage experiments and wanted to learn 

 more about the actual structures of the molecules which the geneticists talked 

 about so passionately. At the same time John needed a student and hoped 

 that I should help him with his X-ray studies on myoglobin. I thus became a 

 research student of Clare College with John as my supervisor. 



But almost as soon as I set foot in the Cavendish, I inwardly knew I would 

 never be of much help to John. For I had already started talking with 

 Francis. Perhaps even without Francis, I would have quickly bored of 

 myoglobin. But with Francis to talk to, my fate was sealed. For we quickly 

 discovered that we thought the same way about biology. The center of 

 biology was the gene and its control of cellular metabolism. The main 

 challenge in biology was to understand gene replication and the way in 

 which genes control protein synthesis. It was obvious that these problems 

 could be logically attacked only when the structure of the gene became 

 known. This meant solving the structure of DNA. Then this objective 

 seemed out o£ reach to the interested geneticists. But in our cold, dark 

 Cavendish lab, we thought the job could be done, quite possibly within a 

 few months. Our optimism was partly based on Linus Pauling's feat 1 in 

 deducing the a-helix, largely by following the rules of theoretical chemistry 

 so persuasively explained in his classical The Nature of the Chemical Bond. We 

 also knew that Maurice Wilkins had crystalline X-ray diffraction photo- 

 graphs from DNA and so it must have a well-defined structure. There was 

 thus an answer for somebody to get. 



During the next eighteen months, until the double-helical structure be- 

 came elucidated, we frequently discussed the necessity that the correct struc- 

 ture have the capacity for self-replication. And in pessimistic moods, we of- 

 ten worried that the correct structure might be dull. That is, it would 



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