The River Divides into Thousands of Branches

Epilogue

Looking back, we can say that from 1943 into the 1960s was an historic period in biology, a time when some of its greatest mysteries were solved. Among these were the nature of the genetic material, its atomic structure, how it replicates, how it encodes genetic information, how it is regulated, how genetic information is translated into proteins. This period was followed in the 1970s and 1980s with the discovery of enzymes that cleave DNA at particular sequences and the inventions of gene cloning, DNA sequencing and the Polymerase Chain Reaction. The foundational insights from the early years together with the transformative technologies brought about a new era, a turning point, in which molecular biology branched out to tackle a vast array of problems in the life sciences.

Among the many areas that could and can now be tackled at the molecular level are genes and genomes, gene control, cells and multicellular organisms, cellular differentiation, biological diversity, diseases, evolution, physiology, immunology and neurobiology. Two of many examples of important new findings that emerged from the application of molecular biology were the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of introns and exons and somatic recombination in the generation of antibody diversity. And yet more transformative technological advances were developed, such as single cell sequencing, proteomics, RNA interference and gene editing, tools that promise yet more advances in the future.

No one has expressed the nature of this turning point more elegantly than Matthew Meselson (video) who likened the history of molecular biology to “a river that splits into thousands of branches”.

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