Who invented molecular phylogeny? Who came with the idea of comparing macromolecules for purposes of elucidating the relationships among taxa? For years my colleagues and I thought that the first to come up with this idea was Emile Zuckerkandl in a 1965 paper co-authored with Linus Pauling “Molecules as documents of evolutionary history” (J. Theor. Biol. 8:357–366).

Well, it seems that in 1958, the same idea was put forward by Francis Crick in a paper entitled “On protein synthesis.” (Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. 12:138–163).

On page 142, we read:

Biologists should realize that before long we shall have a subject which might be called ‘protein taxonomy’—the study of the amino acid sequences of the proteins of an organism and the comparison of them between species. It can be argued that these sequences are the most delicate expression possible of the phenotype of an organism and that vast amounts of evolutionary information may be hidden away within them.

What can I say? Not as elegant or as detailed as Zuckerkandl and Pauling, but Francis Crick essentially scooped these guys by seven years.

So, Francis Crick not only determined the double helical structure of DNA and postulated the necessity of tRNA and rRNA, he was also the father of molecular phylogeny.

Again, I conclude that reading the old literature can sometimes be extremely rewarding.