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A file comprising notes (holograph) made by Crick on George Gamow's so-called 'diamond code', as published in Nature, 173 (1954), 318, a reprinted copy of which is included.

Also included is Gamow and Ycas, "Statistical correlation of protein and ribonucleic acid composition," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 41: 12 (1955), 1011-9 (reprinted paper, unmarked), and a typescript (carbon) of Gamow (1954), "On information transfer from nucleic acids to proteins," with comments (holograph) from Gamow on pages 1 and 4.

The file includes a letter from Gamow to Crick (dated, without year, "Dec 7th") in which he refers to the inclusion of a manuscript "which may reduce ... decoding time to only a few hundred hours" and notes that "RNATIE is in production".

In What Mad Pursuit (1988), Crick writes (pp. 90-1, 92): "One day [1953] a letter arrived from America written in a large, round, unknown hand. We found we had already heard of its author, the physicist and cosmologist George Gamow, but the contents of the letter were quite new to us. Gamow had been intrigued by our papers in Nature. (Indeed we sometimes felt that physicists took more notice of them than biologists.) He jumped to the conclusion that the DNA structure itself was a template for protein synthesis. He noticed that, looked at in a certain way, the structure could have twenty different kinds of cavities, depending on the local sequence of the bases. Since there are about twenty different kinds of amino acids used to form the chains of proteins, he boldly assumed that there was just one type of cavity for each amino acid ... I cannot remember whether Gamow's first letter included a manuscript (I think this arrived a little later)...."

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Gamow's Stuff

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