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Is DNA the “secret of life”?
Author(s) -
Commoner Barry
Publication year - 1965
Publication title -
clinical pharmacology and therapeutics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.941
H-Index - 188
eISSN - 1532-6535
pISSN - 0009-9236
DOI - 10.1002/cpt196563273
Subject(s) - dna , inheritance (genetic algorithm) , gene duplication , genetic code , nucleotide , computational biology , function (biology) , biology , genetics , property (philosophy) , chemistry , gene , philosophy , epistemology
There is at this time a widely held belief that, with the discovery of certain molecular attributes of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical basis of inheritance has at last been elucidated. However, a recent re‐examination of the data which have been advanced to support this conclusion 1 and of a wider range of evidence relative to the problem 2 , 3 suggests strongly that DNA is neither a self‐sufficient genetic “code” nor the “master chemical” of the cell. This re‐evaluation of the problem suggests instead that inheritance depends on multimolecular interactions which occur in no system less complex than that in an intact cell; self‐duplication is, therefore, not a molecular attribute of DNA, but a property of the whole cell. These considerations lead to the proposal that DNA plays two distinctive roles in the complex chemistry of inheritance; one is related to a template function and the other to the influence of DNA synthesis on the metabolic availability of free nucleotides in the cell.