In this letter the biochemist Fritz Lipmann reported on work on the coding problem undertaken by fellow Nobel Laureate Severo Ochoa at New York University School of Medicine. Crick's contention that the code was degenerate, i.e. that more than one triplet could code for an amino acid, was borne out during the next few years, and Lipmann's doubts in this regard, expressed in his letter, were disproved. The letter also demonstrated that by 1961, most researchers had abandoned the idea that the code might be overlapping, that is, that a triplet might share a base with both the preceding and succeeding triplet.
Number of Image Pages:
2 (134,947 Bytes)
Date:
1961-11-27 (November 27, 1961)
Creator:
Lipmann, Fritz
Recipient:
Crick, Francis
Source:
Original Repository: Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers
Letter from Francis Crick to Fritz Lipmann (November 16, 1961)