> I find it mainly amusing because the previous battle similar to this was from people who thought nucleic acids couldn't be coding molecules while proteins could!
Did you mean s/be coding molecules/have catalytic function/ ?
I'm referring to the determination that DNA, not protein, was the hereditary molecule. I probably just worded this poorly, to give the implication that coding capability was limited to proteins. It's just that most people at the time thought that DNA was found in either nA (a string of As), nT, nG, or nC, or random arrangements. More than anything people just didn't think that DNA could "code" for anything, while proteins could, because people didn't seem to realize that unique sequences of heteropolymers was a valid form of coding. It was mostly thought that the information was stored in huge structures formed by proteins, and that the coding information was architectural.
See Mayr, "Origin of Biological Thought", final chapter, starting with the section on Meischer. Or Crick's "On Protein Synthesis" where he proposed the linear code: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/scbbzy.pdf
I'm referring to the determination that DNA, not protein, was the hereditary molecule. I probably just worded this poorly, to give the implication that coding capability was limited to proteins. It's just that most people at the time thought that DNA was found in either nA (a string of As), nT, nG, or nC, or random arrangements. More than anything people just didn't think that DNA could "code" for anything, while proteins could, because people didn't seem to realize that unique sequences of heteropolymers was a valid form of coding. It was mostly thought that the information was stored in huge structures formed by proteins, and that the coding information was architectural.
See Mayr, "Origin of Biological Thought", final chapter, starting with the section on Meischer. Or Crick's "On Protein Synthesis" where he proposed the linear code: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/scbbzy.pdf