Thinking about the nucleus

Abstract

One of the most sacred freedom in the scientific world is the freedom to challenge: to test new ideas against old, established ones, to try and explain facts and results by means of new interpretations, sometimes even to believe the unbelievable. Obviously, a consequence of this freedom to challenge is the freedom to be challenged, i.e. any new, earth-shaking theory can be challenged by other scientists. During the summer of 2001, a paper published by Iborra et al. (2001) pushed the scientific community to rethink about one of the basic mechanisms of cell biology: translation. According to this paper, mRNA could be translated, although in a limited amount, also in the nucleus. Other papers confirming these data were soon published and these findings were more or less quietly accepted. However, in January 2003, two papers (Dahlberg et al., 2003; Nathanson et al., 2003) repeated carefully the experiments of Iborra and coworkers and concluded that there was no proof of nuclear translation. In this way, we are restored to our previous dogma of nuclear transcription and cytoplasmic translation.