Title:

Letter from Francis Crick to Alexander Rich

Creator:

Crick, Francis, 1916-2004

Recipient:

Rich, Alexander

Date:

[7 January 1965]

Description:

In 1967, two years after the date of this letter, Crick, Sydney Brenner, and Alan Garen determined that the amber and ochre codons mentioned in the last paragraph (the triplets UAG and UAA, respectively) signal the termination of the polypeptide chain. They were called nonsense codons because it became clear from experiments with certain phage mutants that they do not specify any amino acid during protein synthesis. The names amber and ochre were assigned to them randomly by researchers.. NOTE: The date was mistakenly typed as "7th January 1964." The actual date of this letter is 7 January 1965.

Original Repository:

The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers

Location:

Box: 36. Folder: PP/CRI/E/1/13/4

Rights:

Reproduced with permission of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. and http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/

Genre:

Letters (correspondence)

Subject:

Genetic Code

Format:

Text

Extent:

1 pages

Relation:

Letter from Alexander Rich to Francis Crick, 1965

Language:

English

Legacy Source Citation:

Original Repository. Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers. 11646. URL. http://archives.wellcome.ac.uk/

Legacy ID:

SCBBCX

NLM ID:

101584582X30

Profiles Collection:

The Francis Crick Papers

Shareable Link:

https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/101584582X30

Story Section:

Deciphering the Genetic Code, 1958-1966