DNA didn't do anything at all, as far as anyone could tell. It just sat there in the nucleus, possibly binding the chromosome in some way or adding a splash of acidity on command or fulfilling some other trivial task that no one had yet thought of. The necessary complexity, it was thought, had to exist in proteins in the nucleus.
就大家所知，DNA根本不做任何事情，它只是靜靜地待在細胞核中。它可能以某種方式約束染色體，也可能根據指令增加一點酸度，或者完成一些不得而知的其他微不足道的任務。據認為，復雜的東西非得存在于蛋白質之中。
There were, however, two problems with dismissing DNA. First, there was so much of it: two yards in nearly every nucleus, so clearly the cells esteemed it in some important way. On top of this, it kept turning up, like the suspect in a murder mystery, in experiments. In two studies in particular, one involving the Pneumonococcus bacterium and another involving bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), DNA betrayed an importance that could only be explained if its role were more central than prevailing thought allowed. The evidence suggested that DNA was somehow involved in the making of proteins, a process vital to life, yet it was also clear that proteins were being made outside the nucleus, well away from the DNA that was supposedly directing their assembly.
然而，如果將DNA的作用忽略不計，會引發兩個問題。首先，DNA數量是如此之多，幾乎每個細胞核里都有將近2米長的DNA，顯然它在細胞中起著某種非同小可的作用。最重要的是，它在實驗中頻頻露面，猶如一起神秘的兇殺案中的嫌疑人。尤其是在與肺炎球菌和噬菌體（感染性細菌病毒）有關的兩項研究中，DNA所扮演的重要角色說明它的角色遠遠被低估了。實驗表明，DNA在制造蛋白質這樣對生命至關重要的物質方面起著某種作用，不過人們也很清楚，蛋白質是在細胞核外生成的，與據測對它們聚合施加影響的DNA相距甚遠。
No one could understand how DNA could possibly be getting messages to the proteins. The answer, we now know, was RNA, or ribonucleic acid, which acts as an interpreter between the two. It is a notable oddity of biology that DNA and proteins don't speak the same language. For almost four billion years they have been the living world's great double act, and yet they answer to mutually incompatible codes, as if one spoke Spanish and the other Hindi. To communicate they need a mediator in the form of RNA.
過去，沒有人能夠弄明白DNA是怎樣將信息傳遞給蛋白質的。我們現在知道，是RNA，也就是核糖核酸在這兩者中間起到了一種翻譯作用。DNA和蛋白質操的不是同一種語言，這是生物學里一件引入注目的奇事。在將近40億年的時間里，它們在生命世界中扮演了至關重要的雙簧角色，然而它們各自操的是彼此不能相容的密碼，就好比一個說的是西班牙語，另一個說的是印地語。要想相互交流，它們就得有一個中介，而這個中介就是RNA。
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