George Gamow

George Gamow, a nuclear physicist and cosmologist who helped develop the theory of how the Big Bang formed light elements, read Watson and Crick's 1953 paper and immediately framed the genetic code as a cryptography problem: how could four DNA bases specify twenty amino acids? His specific proposals were wrong, but the RNA Tie Club he founded brought physicists and biologists together on the question until it was cracked in the 1960s.