Simulated lightning flashed over the building blocks.
Desperately they wanted to marry,
But peptides await ebb-tides of a disuniting soup - and a pox
ON that blind watchmaker to miscarry!
For Al was left-handed, Gly was right (it was a 50:50 bid),
But parents are exclusively of the l(aevo)-amino acid
(When Nature tossed the coin, 20 times it was heads). Now Al
Was the simpleton in the amino group,
Left ugly for L-Gly, found a warm, dry bed for his gal -
Somewhere far from her soup -
And in oven heat, basted with Fox’s Glutamic
Acid, fathered a monstrous ‘proteinoid’! Agamic
It dissolved into beads, couldn’t catalyse its own reproduction!
For protein needs a cell for its manufacture,
Where a pro-team of protein assembly workers, ribosomes, from transcription
On RNA templates conjure
Each his sequence of acids in the blueprint DNA
(With obedient storemen to attendance, the transfer RNA).
What the ribosomes contribute to proteinaceous generation is parfait,
Standardized, tissue material!
How near to the linear information, encoded in DNA,
May be judged by the work of the monasterial
Proof-reader of the RNA working copy, a replicase enzyme
That double-checks for mistakes in copying at cell-dividing time
To reduce the error-rate to one base in a hundred million
(Without replicase it would be one in a ton!).
From the Fox building blocks without the protein-making machine