"RNA World" theory strongly supported

from the sing-repeatedly-"It-Was-an-RNA-World-After-All" dept.
Foresight chairman EricDrexler points out this story from Chemical & Engineering News: "The best evidence yet that, before there were proteins, there was once a world in which RNA both provided genetic information and catalyzed chemical reactions comes from a trio of papers in the current issue of Science. In a tour de force of X-ray crystallography, chemists at Yale University have located most of the atoms in the gigantic apparatus that cells use to link amino acids together into proteins. The heart of the apparatus where peptide bonds form, they find, is composed entirely of RNA." See also The RNA World book.