3 - The Central Dogma of molecular biology

Summary

Ah, but my Computations, People say,

Have squared the year to human compass, eh?

If so by striking from the calendar

Unknown tomorrow and dead Yesterday.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald, Second Edition)

Francis Crick and the Central Dogma

Francis Crick (1958) published The Central Dogma, stating his view of how DNA, mRNA and protein interact. The Central Dogma states that information can be transferred from DNA to DNA, DNA to mRNA and mRNA to protein. Three transfers that the Central Dogma states never occur are protein to protein, protein to DNA, protein to mRNA.

On the other hand, the discovery of just one type of present day cell which could carry out any of the three unknown transfers would shake the whole intellectual basis of molecular biology, and it is for this reason that the central dogma is as important as when first proposed.

(Crick, 1970)

Crick need not have worried. He emphasized, correctly, that there is no flow of matter, but, rather, “… sequence information from one polymer molecule to another.” I wrote to Professor Crick (private correspondence, 2002) congratulating him on the Central Dogma. He replied that he believed that the Central Dogma is only an hypothesis. I have shown long ago that Professor Crick hath wrought better than he knew (Yockey 1974, 1978, 1992, 2002).

The Shannon entropy criterion for codes that transfer messages in one alphabet to another

The genetic code has a Central Dogma because it is redundant.