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Research in this field, which is still comparatively recent, found out that every organism has a specific number of chromosomes, which have their own specific shape. Chromosomes are the carriers of hereditary factors. For example, the cells of the human body have 23 pairs of chromosomes = 46 chromosomes, a bee's cells have 8 pairs = 16 chromosomes, a sheep's cells 27 pairs = 54 The protein molecules of the cells consist of chains of amino acids. Given this piece of scientific information, we were faced with the new question of how living cells originated from amino acids. In connection with the only partially solved problem of how protein could come into being before there were living cells, Rutherford Platt describes the theory held by Dr George Wald of Harvard University. Wald assumed that under certain natural conditions amino acids must give the answer. Dr S.W. Fox of the Institute for Molecular Evolution, Miami, tested this idea by drying out solutions of amino acids. Fox and his collaborators observed that the amino acids formed long thread-like sub- microscopic structures. They had formed chain compounds containing hundreds of amino molecules. Dr Fox called them 'protenoids'’, i.e. protein-like matter. Moser succeeded in producing protein matter from poisonous prussic acid and water in 1961. Three scientists from the Salk Institute, Robert Sanchez, James Ferris and Leslie Orgel, managed to produce synthetically the nucleic acids essential for metabolism and reproduction—those combinations of nucleic bases, carbohydrates and phosphoric acid occurring in the nuclei. After our brief canter through chemistry and biology, the main thing for the reader to have grasped is that the construction of a living organism is a chemical process. 'Life' can be produced in laboratories. But what connection have nucleic acids with life? Nucleic acids determine the complicated process of heredity. The sequence of four bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine—gives the genetic code for all forms of life. Once this discovery was made, chemistry was able to remove a great deal of the mystery surrounding life. There are two groups of nucleic acids whose names have become familiar to every assiduous newspaper reader: RNA (ribosenucleic acid) and DNA (deoxyribosenucleic acid). Both RNA and DNA are necessary for the synthesis of protein in the cells. It is a fact that the proteins of all organisms examined so far are built up of about twenty amino acids and that the sequence, or arrangement, of amino acids in a protein molecule is determined by the sequence of the four bases in the DNA (= the genetic code). But even if we know the structure of the genetic code, we are still a long way from being able to read the information stored in a chromosome. Nevertheless the thought that twenty amino acids are the bearers of all life and that their own arrangement in protein molecules is laid down in the genetic code is earth-shaking. In his book The Biological Timebomb George Rattray Taylor quotes the views of the Nobel prize-winners Dr Max Perutz and Professor Marshall W. Nierenberg on the tremendous the cells and the nuclei. chromosomes. Following the investigations of Professors J. Oro and A. P. Kimball, the chemists Dr Matthews and Dr