Nearly everybody knows that Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, the house in Pennsylvania that sits above and appears to cascade into a waterfall. I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris is similarly famous. And Frank Gehry is widely known for the curvilinear shining steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
But most people couldn’t name the contractors and subcontractors responsible for translating those great architects’ blueprints into solid structures.
Geneticists have the same problem. Details for erecting an organism’s structure are encoded within DNA, written in chemical subunits designated by the letters A, T, C and G. But it has been hard to say exactly who takes those details and oversees the construction of the organism from proteins and other molecular materials.