The DNA Enigma When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they made a shocking discovery. DNA could store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Their structural model of DNA showed that strings of precisely sequenced chemical subunits called “nucleotide bases”—affixed along the interior of the DNA double-helix backbone—could store and transmit information (Fig. 9.1). Crick developed this idea further in 1958 with his now famous “sequence hypothesis,” according to which the chemical subunits of DNA (the nucleotide bases) function just as letters in a written text
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