✅ True

👔 George Gamow (1904–1968), renowned physicist and contributor to the Big Bang Theory, founded the RNA Tie Club in 1954
🔬 It had 20 regular members (one for each amino acid) and four honorary members (one for each nucleotide base)
🧬 Members wore wool ties with a green and yellow double helix design

🔍 George Gamow

🧩🧬 George Gamow was the first to attempt to decipher the genetic code
💎🔑 He proposed the diamond code, approaching the problem independently of biochemical constraints
🧬✨ His model allowed for 20 amino acids, leading to the concept of the “magic twenty”

👔 The RNA Tie Club

💡🚫 The club helped advance molecular biology through collaboration but did not achieve the goal of deciphering the genetic code
🎉🏆 In 1961, the non-members Marshall Nirenberg (1927–2010) and Johann Matthaei (*1929) demonstrated that:
         o messenger RNA is required for protein synthesis
         o  synthetic messenger RNA preparations can be used to decipher various aspects of the genetic code

“They produced a long RNA chain consisting of a single nucleotide. When this resulted in a long chain of a single amino acid, the first part of the genetic code puzzle fell into place.”

—nobelprize.org

👉 Fun Fact

😄🌟 Gamow had a charming personality and quirky sense of humor
📄✍️ In the publication “The Origin of Chemical Elements”, written with his Ph.D. student Ralph Alpher, he wanted to make his completely uninvolved friend Hans Bethe (Nobel Prize for Physics in 1967) a co-author, only to have the list of authors read Alpher, Bethe, Gamow
🔤🌌 This α-β-γ paper introduced the Big Bang Theory for the first time [1].

Reference

[1] R. A. Alpher, H. Bethe, G. Gamow, The Origin of Chemical Elements, Phys. Rev. 1948, 73, 803–804. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.73.803

Source

Spotlight: Deciphering the Genetic Code: The Most Beautiful False Theory in Biochemistry

ChemistryViews August 3, 2021.

Countless scientists contributed to its clarification with brilliance, ingenuity, intuition, and luck