The Very Big and the 

 Very Small 



REMARKS ON CONJUGATED PROTEINS 



ERWIN CHARGAFF 



It is an old experience in the natural sciences that what is poison 

 for one generation often is honey for the succeeding one. Whether 

 this indicates, in a given case, the dawn of a better era or an inurement 

 by frequent exposure to sublethal doses of truth often cannot be 

 decided without the perspective of centuries. There are important 

 exceptions, but in general a scientific truth fades every 30 years, to 

 be replaced by another equally evanescent. A well-designed and well- 

 constructed chair lasts longer. 



It is not very long ago that the extreme contempt for the amorphous 

 and intractable, felt by generations of organic chemists (or at least 

 by the second-rate specimens) has made room for the realization that 

 there is little sense in treating living and growing tissue merely as 

 the starting material for the isolation of well-behaved crystalline sub- 

 stances. In recent times, the respect for nature and its multiform 

 manifestations (as such a very healthy sign) has, in fact, sometimes 

 assumed exaggerated proportions ; and it is occasionally necessary to 

 point out that the living cell is not simply a macromolecule with a 

 skin, or the bacteriophage a nucleoprotein with a tail. So-called model 

 experiments often are carried to incredible lengths, prompting one to 

 say that confusion superimposed on complexity may produce papers. 

 but not results, and that a skunk dipped into chlorophyll is not yet an 

 apple tree. The secret of the organization of the cell will not be found 

 by a clever sleight of hand. 



It is, however, becoming clear that organization, as observed on 

 the macroscopic and microscopic levels, must be matched, on the sub- 

 microscopic and molecular levels, by the existence of patterns in which 

 the varied arrangement of a limited number of constituents serves to 



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