'Scientifically Speaking' (BBC Radio 3)

Date:
1974
Reference:
PP/CRI/H/5/13
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: 'Scientifically Speaking' (BBC Radio 3). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE ATTACHED SCRIPT ms TYPED FRCM A TELEDIPHOHE ESCOHDHIG AKD TOP COPIED Mil M OKEGimii SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE HTSK OP MISHEÄRH3G AMD THE DIFFICULTY IH SOME CASES OP iDMTIFYIHG- DTDIVIDHAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CAHNOT VOUCH POR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. SCIEHTIITCALLY SEEÔEEMG , Presented by John Maddox 0lUNt% Jt // ^ TRANSMISSION? 25th March, 1974. 2200-2245. RADIO MADDOX: Good evening. Tonight we'll he talking about where molecular biology is leading. Dr. Prancis Crick explains how he's been led into developmental biology, and Dr. Morton Bradbury describes the molecular trigger for cell division. It's just twenty— one years since Dr. Prancis Crick and Dr. James Watson sent off for publication their momentous article on DMA. to the journal MTŒHE. It was dated April 2nd and published later in the month. How in 1974 it's not easy to reconstruct the way the biologists were thinking 21 years ago. That there should be in some sense or other a molecular explanation of life was commonly believed. In this country people like the late Professor Desmond Bur noil, the crystalographer, had been saying just this for years. In the United States Linus Paulin» on ex-physicist like Crick, the biochemist Chargaff, and a host of others, were chasing the same objectives to explain the process of genetic inheritance in terms of the properties of the molecules of which Chromosomen are made. Proteins and nucleic acids. Par a time there -was a suspicion that the answer lay in the protein molecules, but that was largely because more was known abcrut then than about nucleic acids. By the late 1940s# however, it was clear that nucleic acids were the key. By then people had grasped the significance of some experiments by the American biologist Awry, reported in the early 1940s, in which nucleic acid from one
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