Transcription and Translation, excerpt 2 MIT 7.01SC Fundamentals of Biology
PROFESSOR: Good morning. Come on down. All right. So last time, we talked about the first couple of steps of the central dogma. The central dogma is this name given to the statement DNA goes to DNA by replication. DNA goes to RNA by the process of transcription. We call it transcription because it's such a direct copying of letter to letter. RNA goes to protein by a process of translation, because translation is the kind of word we would use between two different languages. And there are two different languages-- the languages of nucleotides and the language of amino acids. For what it's worth, it's name, the central dogma, goes back to Francis Crick, who called this the central dogma. He did it in a kind of a light-hearted way, although others since then have criticized it, saying, oh, this is dogmatic. Actually, Crick said not that DNA goes to RNA goes to the protein. He says that all information flows from nucleic acids to proteins and not back again. Becau...