One‐gene‐one‐enzyme: Remembering biochemical genetics

Abstract

The discovery that proteins are encoded in the genes, which are themselves not proteins, has long seemed to me to be the key to understanding the organization of living matter.To be able to state with confidence that the genetic part of the organismthe part that is transmitted from generation to generationconsists of instructions in the form of DNA for the synthesis of proteins, which later produce and operate the organism, implies a depth of knowledge that would have astonished biologists of an earlier day.In their Enzymes (3rd edition, 1979), Dixon and Webb called this insight "probably the most important discovery ever made in biology."I agree.This discovery rests on the work of many scientists of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, most of whom did not live to see the outcome of their efforts.I am a survivor who was lucky enough to work in one of the laboratories-that of Beadle and Tatum at Stanford University in the 1940s -that contributed to the grand conclusion and who has lived to see its general acceptance.This essay recalls the early years of what we called "biochemical genetics"-roughly, the decade preceding the discovery of the structure of DNA.Following the DNA breakthrough, biochemical genetics became part of the science of molecular genetics, which then came into existence.I learned genetics in the first half of the century.Thomas Hunt Morgan was chairman of my Ph.D. oral committee, in 1939.I can remember the genetics of those days-a specialized science with its own language and its own units, only weakly connected to the rest of biology, not widely considered to be very important, let alone central, to biology as a whole.It was of-

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