But those didn’t satisfy Woese. He wanted something more basic, more universal—something that went all the way back, or nearly all the way, to the beginnings of life. “The obvious choice of molecules here lies in the components of the translation apparatus,” he told Crick. “What more ancient lineages are there?” By “translation apparatus,” Woese meant the decoding mechanism, the system that turns DNA information into proteins—the same system that Crick had groped toward understanding in his 1958 paper “On Protein Synthesis.”
