Interviewee: Sydney Brenner. Sydney Brenner talks about James Watson's work on RNA. (DNAi Location: Code > Copying the code > Players > Sydney Brenner > James Watson and RNA)

Well, after the double helix, Jim returned to America and his science, his research program was to solve the structure of RNA, because he thought that would give him the clues to how proteins were made. Now you see, the double helix is a story of success because doing the structure of DNA gave immediate insight into replication, mutation, the code and so on, although we didn't know it, but it said this is it. But doing the structure of RNA, it's unclear even in hindsight if the structure would have told you anything about how proteins were made. So there was this kind of faith that if we could get the structure we'll get the understanding. They didn't get the structure but even if they could have got it, I doubt whether they could have the understanding.

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