Experiment, difference and writing : I: Tracing protein synthesis / Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.
Abstract:
'The present study focusses on the construction of an "in vitro" system of tracing protein synthesis (I, this article), and the laboratory emergence of "transfer RNA" (II, to appear next issue). Transfer RNA came to occupy a central place within the scaffold of molecular biology. It formed, at the beginning of the 1960s, a powerful experimental handle for dealing with the genetic code, and it bridged the gap between DNA, that stores genetic information, and proteins, that realize its biological meaning. The history of its early test-tube representation as "soluble RNA", however, has to be understood from a completely different, biomedical, bioenergetical and biochemical research background. The assessment of some steps of its production process is intended to exemplify a more general concept of how the history of science can be set in perspective as a history of èxperimental events'.'
Studies in history and philosophy of science Vol. 23 (1992), p. 305-331, 389-422