Twenty years: a very short sequence in the RNA world.

Abstract

Lucky for me, my scientific career has encompassed the entire “official” history of the RNA journal and the RNA Society: ribozymes to miRNAs to lncRNAs; Northern blots to PCR to deep sequencing; nuclease structure probing to crystallography to cryo-electron microscopy. Of course, I wasn't there at the very beginning—the RNA world rumbled for quite a while before the Society erupted. At the time, some of the RNA world's rumblings were hard to understand. Why were mutations that affected the function of the ribosome in the RNA, not the protein? What!?—You think you can predict the stability of an RNA stem just by adding the free energies of nearest neighbor base pairs? Why was messenger RNA missing sequences that existed in the DNA encoding it? What ARE all of those small nuclear RNAs? You're telling me it does that without protein! Whoa, RNA-RNA base pairing between those snRNAs and mRNA is required for splicing out those missing pieces!! The various RNA world rumblings ultimately resulted in the RNA Processing meeting, held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), and this meeting was the precursor to today's RNA Society meeting. The very first talk I gave in my scientific career was at the RNA Processing meeting in an old CSHL auditorium that is no longer used. I was in a cast, having recently hurt my knee skiing. The weather was cold so I wore long pants over my full-length walking cast, and for years, many RNA scientists thought I had a permanent disability. (At the banquet, the late David Apirion told me sweetly that he didn't know what was wrong with me, but if I had been able to dance, he would have asked me.) The official CSHL pointer at the time was an ∼20-foot-long bamboo pole that tapered at the end. I remember holding on tightly to the podium in hopes that me and my cast would not topple over and watching the end of the pole wave wildly as it transmitted the impulse from my shaking hands. In those days women scientists were fewer, and we were all housed in the “Hooper” dormitory, where Barbara McClintock had an apartment on the ground floor. One morning I came out of the building and there she was, just standing in the yard. I still kick myself that as an inexperienced young graduate student I didn't have the nerve to talk to this legend, since I never was presented with this opportunity again. Hooper was an old building, and typically we did not lock the doors to our dorm rooms; in fact, I don't remember even having a key. However, one year, for reasons that are unclear, something changed. I don't remember whether we were given keys, but I do know that we were not informed that the doors would lock behind us. This of course led to a number of scientists returning to their rooms after their showers, in their towels, only to find that they were locked out of their rooms. For the next part of the story I do not know the truth from the urban legend. But what I heard (amidst lots of giggles) was that when one of our most loved and esteemed Society members was caught in the hall in her “skivvies,” the problem was quickly taken care of by an esteemed CSHL resident who was NOT a member of the RNA Society. What I do know for certain is that when we all returned to our rooms that night, the lock on each and every room was carefully taped to the open position. Yup, there was a lot of history before the RNA Society finally erupted. In fact, the dawn of the RNA Society and its journal was not a precise moment, but began with subtle rumblings that a few, and then many, could feel. (I should note that there are true and indisputable facts in this article, although this is clearly a biased history. While I decided not to use names of the living, suffice it to say, you will know who you are and are welcome to reveal yourself to your colleagues.)