The swinging sixties
1961 was an eventful year for the world, with the Bay of Pigs crisis, the start of the Vietnam War, Elvis Presley on the radio and West Side Story in the cinema. It was also a very busy year for the new science of molecular biology.
French scientists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob showed how another molecule, RNA, helps turn DNA into a protein. Marshall Nirenberg and Johann Matthaei began to crack the genetic code by showing how DNA is made up of groups of base pairs arranged in a sequence. Within five years, the entire genetic code had been deciphered.
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