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.
The discovery of transfer RNA, described here by Mahlon Hoagland, was critical during a time when an understanding of genetic machinery began to unfold. According to the ISI database, more than 600 papers have cited Hoagland's publication. Hoagland said late last year he considers this finding, along with uncovering the mechanism of amino acid activation in protein synthesis, "my two key discoveries. I can't say the ...
