"The genetic code" (The Charles West Lecture)

Date:
1964
Reference:
PP/CRI/H/3/14
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: "The genetic code" (The Charles West Lecture). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE GENETIC CODS F.H.C. Crick It gives me very great pleasure to be here to give The Charles West Lecture, but it causes me a certain degree of embarrassment because I am, in origin, a physicist and this is strictly a medical lecture and a medical occasion. My excuse is that the topic I have chosen - the genetic code - is one which is of very great importance to all biological organisms, ourselves included. If you were to press me and as ^ exactly how our knowledge of the genetic code will be important for medicine I could not easily, at this stage, tell you precisely, but I can make the general forecast that it will certainly have repercussions in medicine within our lifetime. The problem of the genetic code is basically speaking the problem of protein synthesis. Proteins are important for two main reasons. The major reason is that all the catalysts that we find in living cells - all the enzymes - are made of protein. In addition, in animals, but less so in plants, proteins also fulfil a structural role. For a simple organism, such as a bacterial cell, it is almost true to say that once you have specified the correct proteins you have done the ;job of specifying the whole organism. Of course it is true that you have got to start with a cell. That is, you must have pre-existing components of various kinds, but the most impor- lut tant thing is to get all the proteins right. We dóto&ü know exactly how many different proteins there are in, for example, Escherichia coli, but a reasonable guess would be perhaps two thousand.