Thirty years of structural changes

The concluding statement of Watson and Crick’s historic paper on the structure of DNA 1 enshrines a key tenet of molecular mechanistic cell biology: “… the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. Function — heredity in this case — is embedded in the redundant sequence information of the two strands of DNA. Although not always expressed as blatantly, the intimate dependence of cellular function on the mechanical level of macromolecules is inspirational. The devil is in the structural detail, and the painstaking quest for the correct details and their returns in the form of reliable knowledge knows no shortcuts.