74 NUCLEOPROTEINS AND NUCLEIC ACIDS 



provides an example of a system through which information is 

 preserved. Our recent suggestion^, in which the regularity ob- 

 served in ribonucleic acids, namely, the equality in the propor- 

 tions of 6-amino and of 6-keto compounds (compare Table 19), 

 is translated into a relationship with protein, whose regularly oc- 

 curring peptide bonds could, through hydrogen bonding, impose 

 this regularity upon two polynucleotide chains, is an example of 

 a system through which information is transferred. 



I believe, however, that while the nucleic acids, owing to the 

 enormous number of possible sequential isomers, could contain 

 enough codescripts to provide a universe with information, at- 

 tempts to break the communications code of the cell are doomed 

 to failure at the present very incomplete stage of our knowledge. 

 Unless we are able to separate and to discriminate, we may find 

 ourselves in the position of a man who taps all the wires of a 

 telephone system simultaneously. It is, moreover, my impression 

 that the present search for templates, in its extreme mechano- 

 morphism, may well look childish in the future and that it may 

 be wrong to consider the mechanisms through which inheritable 

 characteristics are transmitted or those through which the cell 

 repeats itself as proceeding in one direction only. With these 

 words I have perhaps again tied the knot that I tried to open in 

 the beginning, since it may be that the first causes themselves are 

 subject to a random priority. 



