Editing Carl Woese (section)

=== Early work on the genetic code ===
Woese turned his attention to the [[genetic code]] while setting up his lab at [[General Electric]]'s [[GE Global Research|Knolls Laboratory]] in the fall of 1960.<ref name="sapp2009"/> Interest among physicists and molecular biologists had begun to coalesce around deciphering the correspondence between the twenty [[amino acids]] and the four letter alphabet of [[Nucleobase|nucleic acid bases]] in the decade following [[James D. Watson]], [[Francis Crick]], and [[Rosalind Franklin]]'s discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953.<ref name="pnas2012"/> Woese published a series of papers on the topic. In one, he deduced a correspondence table between what was then known as "soluble RNA" and DNA based upon their respective [[base pair]] ratios.<ref name="woese1961ratio">{{Cite journal 
| doi = 10.1038/189920a0 
| last1 = Woese | first1 = C. R. 
| author-link1 = Carl Woese
| title = Composition of various ribonucleic acid fractions from micro-organisms of different deoxyribonucleic acid composition 
| journal = Nature 
| volume = 189 
| issue = 4768 
| pages = 920–921 
| year = 1961 
| pmid = 13786175
|bibcode = 1961Natur.189..920W | s2cid = 4201322 }}</ref> He then re-evaluated experimental data associated with the hypothesis that viruses used one base, rather than a triplet, to encode each amino acid, and suggested 18 codons, correctly predicting one for [[proline]].<ref name="sapp2009"/><ref name="woese1961viruses">{{Cite journal 
| doi = 10.1038/190697a0 
| last1 = Woese | first1 = C. R. 
| author-link1 = Carl Woese
| title = Coding ratio for the ribonucleic acid viruses 
| journal = Nature 
| volume = 190 
| issue = 4777 
| pages = 697–698 
| year = 1961 
| pmid = 13786174
|bibcode = 1961Natur.190..697W | s2cid = 4221490 }}</ref> Other work established the mechanistic basis of protein translation, but in Woese's view, largely overlooked the genetic code's evolutionary origins as an afterthought.<ref name="pnas2012"/>

In 1962, Woese spent several months as a visiting researcher at the [[Pasteur Institute]] in [[Paris]], a locus of intense activity on the molecular biology of gene expression and gene regulation.<ref name="sapp2009"/> While in Paris, he met [[Sol Spiegelman]], who invited Woese to visit the [[University of Illinois]] after hearing his research goals; at this visit Spiegelman offered Woese a position with immediate [[tenure]] beginning in the fall of 1964.<ref name="sapp2009"/> With the freedom to patiently pursue more speculative threads of inquiry outside the mainstream of biological research, Woese began to consider the genetic code in evolutionary terms, asking how the codon assignments and their translation into an amino acid sequence might have evolved.<ref name="sapp2009"/><ref name="woese1964">{{Cite journal | last1 = Woese | first1 = C. R. | author-link1 = Carl Woese| last2 = Hinegardner | first2 = R. T. | last3 = Engelberg | first3 = J. | doi = 10.1126/science.144.3621.1030 | title = Universality in the Genetic Code | journal = Science | volume = 144 | issue = 3621 | pages = 1030–1031 | year = 1964 | pmid =  14137944|bibcode = 1964Sci...144.1030W | doi-access =  }}</ref>