On 2016 Nov 21, Donald Forsdyke commented:

THE RNA WORLD AND DARRYL REANNEY

The title of historian Neeraja Sankaran's paper in a "special historical issue" of the Journal of Molecular Evolution implies that the RNA world idea was formulated 30 years ago (i.e. 1986) by a single author, Walter Gilbert (1). Yet the paper traces the story to authors who wrote at earlier times. Missing from the author list is Darryl Reanney who, like Gilbert, documented a "genes in pieces" hypothesis in February 1978 and went on to explore the RNA world idea with the imperative that error-correcting mechanisms must have evolved at a very early stage (2). Much of Reanney's work is now supported (3).

However, Sankaran cites the video of a US National Library of Medicine meeting organized by historian Nathaniel Comfort on 17th March 2016 (4). Here W. F. Doolittle, who had consistently cited Reanney, discusses the evolutionary speculation triggered by the discovery of introns in 1977, declaring that "several things came together at that time," things that "a guy named Darryl Reanney had been articulating before that." Furthermore, "it occurred to several of us simultaneously and to Darryl Reanney a bit before – before me anyway – that you could just recast the whole theory in terms of the RNA world."

Gilbert himself thought that "most molecular biologists did not seriously read the evolution literature; probably still don’t." Indeed, contemporary molecular biologists writing on "the origin of the RNA world," do not mention Reanney (5). Thus, we look to historians to put the record straight.

1.Sankaran N (2016) The RNA world at thirty: a look back with its author. J Mol Evol DOI 10.1007/s00239-016-9767-3 Sankaran N, 2016

2.Reanney DC (1987) Genetic error and genome design. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol 52:751-757

3.Forsdyke DR (2013) Introns first. Biological Theory 7:196-203 Paper here

4.Comfort N (2016) The origins of the RNA world. Library of Congress Webcast. NLM Webcast

5.Robertson MP, Joyce GF (2012) The origins of the RNA world. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol 4:a003608. Robertson MP, 2012

On 2016 Nov 21, Donald Forsdyke commented:

THE RNA WORLD AND DARRYL REANNEY

The title of historian Neeraja Sankaran's paper in a "special historical issue" of the Journal of Molecular Evolution implies that the RNA world idea was formulated 30 years ago (i.e. 1986) by a single author, Walter Gilbert (1). Yet the paper traces the story to authors who wrote at earlier times. Missing from the author list is Darryl Reanney who, like Gilbert, documented a "genes in pieces" hypothesis in February 1978 and went on to explore the RNA world idea with the imperative that error-correcting mechanisms must have evolved at a very early stage (2). Much of Reanney's work is now supported (3).

However, Sankaran cites the video of a US National Library of Medicine meeting organized by historian Nathaniel Comfort on 17th March 2016 (4). Here W. F. Doolittle, who had consistently cited Reanney, discusses the evolutionary speculation triggered by the discovery of introns in 1977, declaring that "several things came together at that time," things that "a guy named Darryl Reanney had been articulating before that." Furthermore, "it occurred to several of us simultaneously and to Darryl Reanney a bit before – before me anyway – that you could just recast the whole theory in terms of the RNA world."

Gilbert himself thought that "most molecular biologists did not seriously read the evolution literature; probably still don’t." Indeed, contemporary molecular biologists writing on "the origin of the RNA world," do not mention Reanney (5). Thus, we look to historians to put the record straight.

1.Sankaran N (2016) The RNA world at thirty: a look back with its author. J Mol Evol DOI 10.1007/s00239-016-9767-3 Sankaran N, 2016

2.Reanney DC (1987) Genetic error and genome design. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol 52:751-757

3.Forsdyke DR (2013) Introns first. Biological Theory 7:196-203 Paper here

4.Comfort N (2016) The origins of the RNA world. Library of Congress Webcast. NLM Webcast

5.Robertson MP, Joyce GF (2012) The origins of the RNA world. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol 4:a003608. Robertson MP, 2012