Yury Borisovich Rumer and his ‘biological papers’ on the genetic code

Yury Borisovich Rumer was one of the most important theoretical physicists of the former Soviet Union in the early 1930s. However, he also wrote a few ‘biological papers’ on the standard genetic code after he read Crick's and Nirenberg's pioneering papers on the topic. Rumer's articles on the ‘Systematization of Codons in the Genetic Code’ (Rumer 1966Doklady Akademii nauk SSSR 167, 1393–1394); Rumer 1968Doklady Akademii nauk SSSR 183, 225–226; Rumer 1969Doklady Akademii nauk SSSR 187, 937–938, where he suggested the idea of partitioning codons depending on their redundancy—the first mention ofsymmetry in the genetic code—were published in Russian only. Due to their importance and their frequent citation, we here present translations of these articles into English in order to make them accessible to a broader community.