AMPHISBAENA 189 



possible that there is no message, no messenger, that the entire 

 question is asked, and therefore answered, wrongly? 



y: 



If you deny that there is such a thing as "information", you will 

 still have to get the same fellow, but call it by a different name. 



o: 



You want to say what is usually said when one has no answer, 

 that this is merely semantics? 



y: 



Yes. Incidentally, messenger RNA is not the only name; others 

 have referred to it as informational RNA or pulse RNA. The 

 men that really discovered the stuff gave it no name and will 

 therefore be rightly forgotten. 



o: 



This is true, never be a pioneer; not who comes first counts in 

 science, but who comes last. But let us stay with these charming 

 conceits for a Htde while and try to think things through. I know, 

 in our days what cannot be done indirectly, isn't being done at 

 all any more. But chemistry is, after all, the science of substances; 

 and if all this is true there must be a substantial basis to it. You 

 said that it all starts with DNA. This DNA, I take it, exists in the 

 cell as a double-stranded heUx, as what people with a brilliant 

 gift for vulgarization have called "the coil of life". The two 

 strands run in opposite directions with respect to their terminal 

 phosphates and have a complementary nucleotide sequence, so 

 that purines can pair with pyrimidines, adenine with thymine, 

 and guanine with cytosine. And you might say that this scheme 

 was confirmed before it was devised, since this had been shown 

 to be true of the composition of DNA. It has been forgotten 

 completely that the specific base-pairing in nucleic acids was dis- 

 covered in an old-fashioned chemical laboratory. 



