Reprints 66-75

Date:
1969-1973
Reference:
PP/CRI/M/1/4
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reprints 66-75. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, May-June, 1969 Printed in U.S.A. Molecular Biology and Medical Research DR. FRANCIS H. C. CRICK* I want to take a rather different topic from Dr. Beadle. My subject is molecular biology and medical research. I am going to widen it slightly and talk about molecular biology, cell biology, and medical research. My knowl edge of these three topics is very different. I have worked for many years on molecular biology. Recently I have been trying to learn something about cell biology, but about medical research I know very little. My theme is that fundamental work in biology is going to have an in creasing impact on medical practice. I am sure you are all fairly familiar with this idea, but I want to develop it with a reasonable amount of sci entific content. In a certain way we can see that this is acknowledged already by considering the four speakers who are going to address you today, not one of whom is medically qualified. I am in origin a physicist. Dr. Pauling is a chemist and the other two speakers are biologists. I do not think that this choice of speakers is an accident but rather that it reflects the theme I want to bring out. Let me first say what I mean by molecular biology. This is, of course, a portmanteau word, including a lot of biochemistry, genetics, physical chem istry, and related subjects. At the present time the word is used in two rather different ways. In the first usage it has a rather general meaning and covers all the ways in which you can think about a biological problem in molecular terms. The second meaning is rather more limited and covers in particular that part of the subject which has advanced rather rapidly. Biologically it deals with genes and gene products. Chemically it means nucleic acids and proteins and their synthesis. I shall use the latter of these two meanings. One of the characteristics of this sort of molecular biology is that the people working in it were studying properties common to all biological systems. They did not mind particularly, therefore, which organism they worked on pro vided it was convenient, and would often choose microorganisms, as was done by Dr. Beadle in his classical work. The general ideas must be very well known to all of you. The most basic idea is that biological information is mainly carried by the sequence of side groups on the regular back-bone of a macromolecule. Genetically it is carried by nucleic acid, but many such sequences can be translated into the amino acid sequences of proteins by special and rather elaborate pieces of bio chemical machinery. Another important idea is that the complicated three- dimensional structure of a protein is formed by folding up its rather simple linear chemical structure to give a molecule with a definite shape and in many cases a highly specific catalytic activity. I think everyone would agree * Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology, 1962. Member of the staff of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. England.