FOREWORD
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
A science comes of age when the principles on which it was founded have been vindicated and are replaced, as an occupation, by the accumulation of detail—detail from which, of course, further principles will eventually arise. Molecular biology is now entering the stage of detail. However, the detail is so formidable and the techniques for disclosing it are so powerful that successive symposia have had to be restricted to smaller and smaller sectors of the field if they are to remain even partly digestable by the participants. Six years ago, we could hold a symposium on the synthesis of biological macromolecules. This year, it was scarcely possible to do justice to the mechanism of protein synthesis.
Some 150 distinct macromolecules are now known to be involved in the formation of peptide bonds, showing that the workings of the ribosome and its immediate environs are even more complicated than most people...
