Matthew Cobb

And they suddenly realize that

that there's this intermediary, and what happens is that it's like, as they said at the time, it's like a piece of tape.

It's like a tape.

This information comes from the chromosome, from the DNA, and then it's turned into a bit of RNA, which is like a tape, which then goes through the ribosome, which is this structure that was a bit mysterious, to help the cell make a protein.

And that's Crick's thinking, and it's thinking about...

Information.

That's what's in a gene.

It's information.

Now, he's not involved in doing any of the experiments.

And other people, like Jim Watson, did do experiments that also showed that this mRNA existed.

And Jacob and Mono had named it, in fact.

But it's Crick and Brenner, his friend Sidney Brenner, who actually have this idea.

So, yeah, he very much...

you know, pushed the field forward.

I mean, there were hundreds and hundreds of people working in the area by now.

But he's the one who actually really, he becomes, especially after they've discovered the triplet code, that it's a trip, almost certainly, the bases are read in three letters, groups of three letters.

And then everybody starts trying to work out what those three letters mean, these 64 possible combinations there are.

He becomes like the godfather of code, I said.

You know, he travels around

from 61 to 65 all over mainly in america talking to people and people send him their preprints and say look this is what we found he ends up as kind of a clear you know the arbiter of what should be trusted and what shouldn't um although he experiment as an experimentalist he was generally pretty poor the 1961 paper you mentioned is a very rare exception of him actually doing an experiment and it didn't end in disaster