It Has Not Escaped Our Notice That

Haemoglobin Is A Very Large Molecule By Ordinary Standards, Containing About Ten Thousand Atoms, But The Chances Are That Your Haemoglobin And Mine Are Identical, And Significantly Different From That Of A Pig Or Horse. You May Be Impressed By How Much Human Beings Differ From One Another, But If You Were To Look Into The Fine Details Of The Molecules Of Which They Are Constructed, You Would Be Astonished By Their Similarity.

The Major Credit I Think Jim And I Deserve ... Is For Selecting The Right Problem And Sticking To It. It's True That By Blundering About We Stumbled On Gold, But The Fact Remains That We Were Looking For Gold. Both Of Us Had Decided, Quite Independently Of Each Other, That The Central Problem In Molecular Biology Was The Chemical Structure Of The Gene. ... We Could Not See What The Answer Was, But We Considered It So Important That We Were Determined To Think About It Long And Hard, From Any Relevant Point Of View.

Since I Essentially Knew Nothing, I Had An Almost Completely Free Choice.

Moreover The Incorporation Requires The Same Components Needed For Protein Synthesis, And Is Inhibited By The Same Inhibitors. Thus The System Is Most Unlikely To Be A Complete Artefact And Is Very Probably Closely Related To Genuine Protein Synthesis.

It Is Not Easy To Convey, Unless One Has Experienced It, The Dramatic Feeling Of Sudden Enlightenment That Floods The Mind When The Right Idea Finally Clicks Into Place. One Immediately Sees How Many Previously Puzzling Facts Are Neatly Explained By The New Hypothesis. One Could Kick Oneself For Not Having The Idea Earlier, It Now Seems So Obvious. Yet Before, Everything Was In A Fog.