Interviewee: Sydney Brenner. In this second of a two-part clip, Sydney Brenner describes the experiment they did to prove the existence and function of RNA. (DNAi Location: Code > Copying the code > Players > Sydney Brenner > On the beach - Part II)

So what you have to imagine then, if you have a bacterium where all of this is going in, we now inject a new DNA, which comes out of this virus, which carries the messages for the viral proteins and then we knew there was this small RNA, this small amount of RNA, which was a copy of this chemically, I'd satisfied the base composition. And so what we had to prove is that this new RNA goes into pre-existing ribosomes, and then it reprograms them, so it stops playing rock and roll and now starts to play a little minuet of the phage, so that you can get the phage proteins made. And that was the experiment we set out to do.

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