That first week of the discoveries, did you anticipate at that point that this could be such a huge step for our understanding of genes?

Until other examples are found of something new, it’s very hard to know how peculiar that particular phenomenon might be.

We’re always mindful that evolution is amazingly innovative. And so it could have been that this particular small RNA base-pairing to this mRNA of lin-14 gene and turning off production of the protein from lin-14 messenger RNA, that could be a peculiar evolutionary innovation.