NUCLEOPROTEINS 63 



or heavenly reason why the Good Lord should not throw dice if 

 He so desires. 



Be that as it may, there is a strong tendency in all of us to 

 establish some sort of hierarchy and to consider the body or the 

 cell as operating under a chain of commands. Therefore, a bright 

 graduate student will be able to tell us what some of the 

 profoundest intellects in biology would have shuddered to con- 

 template, namely, "DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein". 

 There is, of course, little ground for such a brash statement; 

 but this is a field in which the winds of fashion blow strong, 

 and they have been blowing from this direction for quite some 

 time. The moment will soon have arrived when it will be pos- 

 sible to consider the correctness of this generalization. 



In the following, I shall be able only to touch upon a few 

 aspects of a very large theme, as they may occur to a speaker 

 who attempts to give a comprehensive view, but has little time 

 in which to do it. 



2. NUCLEOPROTEINS 



Our knowledge of the nucleoproteins has gone through a few, 

 rather curious stages-. At the very beginning, i.e., in the times 

 of Miescher, Hoppe-Seyler, Kossel, etc., there existed little doubt 

 that the nucleic acids were, in the cell, attached to proteins and 

 that these nucleoproteins were more than a mere mixture of the 

 partners. The very scanty experimental means then available did 

 not permit to go much further. These ancient masters, who 

 combined a great respect for nature with a great reticence in its 

 interpretation, were succeeded by much more impetuous and 

 less cautious generations; and the.nucleoproteins often were con- 

 sidered as obnoxious obstacles to the purification of the all- 

 important proteins. It is surprising how little work has been done 

 on nucleoproteins in the recent past. Even when the term nucleo- 

 protein appears in the title of a publication, the latter will often 

 be found to deal either with the nucleic acids themselves or with 

 so-called model compounds. 



References p. 75 



