Genome: Chromosome 3 - History

In chapter 3, Dr. Archibald Garrod said that a gene was a recipe for a single chemical. He later came up with a hypothesis, the “inborn errors of metabolism”. This hypothesis states that genes were there to produce chemical catalysts with only one gene to each catalyst. Garrod further explains that the genes were devices for making proteins and that the inborn errors are because of either the loss or malfunction of an enzyme. The main purpose of a gene is to store the recipe for making proteins. Every protein in the body is made by a translation in the genetic code. We inherit from our parents is a big list of recipes for making proteins and that there are much more protein-making machines out there. Later on, Herman Joe Muller’s great discovery was that genes are artificially mutable, which started modern genetics. By using Muller’s X-rays, George Beadle and Edward Tatum proposed a law of biology where one gene specifies one enzyme. The structure of DNA contains a specific coding all lined up on the double helix, which contains four letter codes, A, T, C, and G. These four letter codes were later translated into twenty letter code of amino acids that made up proteins.