Editor's note: Citation Classics Commentaries were written by the authors of studies that were some of the most highly cited papers between 1961 and 1975. The essays were originally published between 1977 and 1993 in Current Contents, a publication of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Scientific. (ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield, also the founder of The Scientist.) In this essay, published in 1985, Mahlon Hoagland describes his experiments that led to the discovery of transfer RNA.













