What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped (2015)

Before the early 1950s, Brenner told me, many scientists “thought that proteins were sort of fuzzy polymers,” just patterns of beads that repeated or had undefined sequences. But by 1953, proteins were found to have defined sequences of beads, and DNA looked like a secret code built from four letters: A, T, G, and C. Each gene in DNA seemed to be an instruction set for assembling a protein’s beads in the right order. Crick proposed that in the DNA code, there might exist special “sense” words, which could dictate a reading frame to the protein-making machinery.

Source: nautil.us