Digital Science Speaker Series: Matthew Cobb – Cracking the Genetic Code

On December the 8th, Matthew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester stopped by our London headquarters to deliver a talk on, ‘Cracking the Genetic Code’.

Much of modern biology was shaped by a single sentence written by Watson and Crick in their second Nature paper of 1953: ‘the precise sequence of the bases is the code that carries the genetical information’. Nothing quite like that had ever been stated before, and yet this view was instantly adopted by scientists all over the world, becoming part of one of the key assumptions about how life works. This talk explores the surprising origins of these ideas and looks at how scientists used them to make one of the decisive breakthroughs of 20th century science – cracking the genetic code.