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Einstein and the theory of quantum mechanics


The necessity for the theory for hypercycles
Manfred Eigen Scientist
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[Q] What was the necessity of your theory for hypercycles? There were experiments or facts which made it necessary that you make a theory which has got the name hypercycles?

As I said genotype/phenotype dichotomy. I said first of all a theory without this translation, and that would get stuck with the error threshold. In order to overcome the error threshold you have to make good proteins. But in order to make proteins you need more information. So you got stuck somehow. So you needed something to overcome this. And the other is the fact that once you do translation you have to test your translation products, your phenotypes, but you have to store your information in the genotype and you have to make sure that you don't lose that, because otherwise everything is gone. So there was a necessity to... and there could well have been a different model. For instance, one model which we later on found and combined with the hypercycle, was that you have to make compartmentation. In other words, you know that all life is not in homogeneous solution, it's always in cells or in organism and so forth. So you'd have to compartmentalise your system of nucleic acids and proteins, but you might immediately ask: isn't it sufficient to compartment them, why then a hypercycle, now you keep protein and nucleic acids together in your compartment? Well, if you only would put them into a compartment, the nucleic acids would start to compete with one another, so you must fit them into a reaction network and that has to be cyclic.


Listeners: Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitch




Tags: hypercycles, genotype/phenotype dichotomy, error threshold, nucleic acids, proteins

Duration: 1 minute, 47 seconds

Date story recorded: July 1997

Date story went live: 24 January 2008