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The "Central Dogma," so coined by Francis Crick in 1957, has either been understood as the rule that

  1. information is transferred from nucleic acids to proteins, and cannot be extracted out from the protein, or
  2. information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and cannot flow in the opposite direction.

Historical scholarship has shown that both Crick and Watson promoted the Central Dogma in a few different forms with varying degrees of nuance, but that it was generally understood by molecular biologists to be a hard-and-fast version of statement 2, above.

Crick's two early statements about the Central Dogma are:

  • Crick, Francis H. C. “Nucleic Acids.” Scientific American 197, no. 3 (1957): 188–203.
  • ———. “On Protein Synthesis.” Symposia for the Society for Experimental Biology 12 (1958): 138–63.

The history of the Central Dogma is addressed in:

  • Kay, Lily E. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Writing Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Olby, Robert C. “Francis Crick, DNA, and the Central Dogma.” Daedalus 99, no. 4 (October 1970): 938–87. doi:10.2307/20023978.
  • Strasser, Bruno J. “A World in One Dimension: Linus Pauling, Francis Crick and the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28, no. 4 (2006): 491–512. 

Found 2 search result(s) for Central Dogma.

Page: iconoclasm in science (HIV/AIDS Research: Its History & Future Meeting)
... scientific disciplines. In this sense, Temin's "iconoclastic" theory of reverse transcription destroyed the "icon" of the Central Dogma that had been so essential in the early development of molecular biology (see 1.5 ...
Aug 26, 2020
Page: 1.5 John Coffin — The Origin of Molecular Retrovirology (HIV/AIDS Research: Its History & Future Meeting)
... kinds of elegant experiments you could do with E. coli. Second, of course, was the Central Dogma articulated by Crick in 1957. 00:05:00 That is to say that information flows from ...
Apr 27, 2021

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