On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...

Scientists have marveled at the ingenuity of the DNA code since it was first deciphered in the early sixties, but now it appears that there is much more to it than previously known. A research team at ...

On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man fiddled with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented fragments of a DNA molecule, and young James Watson was trying to ...

The genetics of a marine protozoan may overturn one of the long-held tenets of protein synthesis. According to conventional wisdom, the genetic code is unambiguous: each DNA triplet, or codon, ...