Interviewee: Marshall Nirenberg. RNA can stimulate protein synthesis.

Everything, everything fell into place, everything worked. I mean we soon found that adding RNA, which would have been prepared from ribosomes, to cell-free extracts of E. coli stimulated amino acid incorporation into protein. All the controls were there, even though the stimulation was tiny, it was like, like thirty counts per minute above a background of maybe a hundred or eighty counts per minute. It was a small stimulation but it was real, and when I saw that, I mean the very first experiment, I knew it was true, I knew that RNA was stimulating, that template RNA was stimulating cell-free protein synthesis, I jumped for joy because we had really, we had really found that RNA, messenger RNA could stimulate protein synthesis.

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