system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What were the pressing questions for biology in the 60s?
gpt
One of the biggest questions of the 60’s: __“How does DNA work?”__

Before the 1950s biology was very focused on proteins, especially enzymes, since you could measure their activity and they had a clear function, DNA was mostly overlooked. But in the early 1950s experiments with bacteriophages demonstrated that DNA, not protein, was the heritable material, and suddenly the focus was on understanding DNA. Soon after that the DNA double helix was described and in the late 50s DNA polymerase was discovered. 

Codons/the genetic code was cracked in the 60s, allowing us to understand how DNA encoded information. mRNA was found to be the intermediate information carrier between nuclear DNA and protein. Later on, the problem of a leading and lagging strand in DNA replication was solved by the discovery of Okazaki fragments. Restriction enzymes were also first discovered in the late 60s and their potential would be realized in later decades. 

The 50s/60s were in many ways the beginning of molecular biology as we know it, and the questions about how DNA works enabled the massive advancements in biology and medicine we’ve seen in recent decades. In the 1970s Sanger sequencing was invented allowing for Genes to be read and cataloged. Uses of restriction enzymes were also discovered so by the late 70s early 80s recombinant DNA was being used to modify genes and engineer bacteria/yeast to make useful proteins, like insulin. PCR was invented in the 90s and the first human genome was sequenced in the 00s….