What History Tells Us Xv. Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (1897-1967) -a Chemical Dynamic Vision Ofthe Organic World

摘要

Whereas the value of the work of Hinshelwood is well acknowledged in physical chemistry (Laidler 1993), his contributions to modern biology are more controversed. He is credited with having been the first to propose that the sequence of nucleotides is responsible for the determination of the sequence of aminoacids in proteins, in an article published in the Journal of the Chemical Society in 1950 (Caldwell and Hinshelwood 1950b): the polypeptide chain is progressively elongated on a polynucleotide matrix of RNA by a process similar to crystallization. A strong argument in favour of the existence of such a process was the similar value (3.4 Angstroms) separating nucleotides in an elongated chain and amino acids in proteins, revealed by the X-ray diffraction studies performed by William Astbury in Leeds (Astbury and Bell 1938).