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RICHARD BROOKE ROBERTS 340 for me, to sympathetically reimagine a period in which it was not yet proved that DNA stored the genetic information and in which the only useful radioactively labeled materials were targets bombarded in the cyclotron and from Oak Ridge, 14C as barium carbonate, 32P as orthophosphate, and 3H as hydrogen gas or water. Anyone interested should get hold of this volume (1955,3), which became known as the E. coli bible. Dick initiated this writing project and was the driving force, though it cost us all a year. I met someone only this year at a meeting in Cambridge who took the trouble to come up and say how much it had helped him in the lab. While the term "feedback inhibition" was devised by others, its existence was proved by the work of the group during this period. A high point of Dick's contributions might be the quantitative analysis and proof that the Krebs cycle (previously recognized as a component of carbohydrate metabolism) was important in the synthetic activities of E. coli. MACROMOLECULAR BIOSYNTHESIS The next period is reflected in a book which Dick put together (1964,1) including all of the reprints of the group for the period and selected annual report sections with comments interpreting their current significance. It reports the transition from investigation of pathways of synthesis of small molecules to studies of ribosomes. In this period, Dick became interested in the code and particularly studied a doublet code, which reflected what we would now refer to as degeneracy, but the influence of this work was minor. The application of the sucrose density gradient to macromolecules came out of Dick's attempts to use layers of sucrose to fractionate ribosomes for kinetic studies. The measurements (with Kenneth McQuillen) of the presence on ribosomes of nascent protein were driven by
