NUCLEIC ACIDS, DECODING, ETC. 173 



it does so. "Pound St. Paul's Church mto atoms, and consider 

 any single atom; it is, to be sure, good for nothing: but, put all 

 these atoms together, and you have St. Paul's Church." (Johnson 

 in Boswell's Life, July 20, 1763). You can see, Samuel Johnson 

 was what you might call a Premature Molecular Biologist; other- 

 wise, he could have considered the possibility that reassembly 

 may yield Liverpool Station. Whether his Umpid eighteenth- 

 century mind would have enjoyed the gnostic stew that is being 

 served up at present remains, however, questionable. 



We have become insensible to the incredible amount of noise 

 and tribal incantations that accompany scientific research in our 

 days. "Tolle, lege!" said a voice to St. Augustine. But if in our 

 time he had, following this injunction, picked up and read one of 

 our foremost picture magazines devoted to illustrating the more 

 appealing and intimate sides of our public personalities, and 

 therefore hard up for copy, this is what he would have seen as a 

 headline in a recent issue: "Will man discover *the molecular 

 structure of God'?" If anything can turn the stomach of a saint, 

 this is it. Has our time forgotten how heavy a word can be? 



