This brings us to what Crick called the Central Dogma of molecular biology. The Central Dogma, as illustrated in Figure 15 , maintains that the information in DNA flows in certain directions. We’ve just spent a fair amount of time discussing how the information in DNA flows back to DNA—the process of replication. More importantly, perhaps, the Central Dogma states that information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and not in the other direction. Note that the information can stop at RNA, and in fact some DNA genes code for RNA molecules (like those used in ribosomes or ribozymes). But most of the information ends up in protein. As we saw in Fundamentals II, proteins are the molecular workhorses of the Quantum Meat. Proteins are used by the cell for everything from structural materials to molecular motors. As Lewis Thomas has pointed out, your genes may carry the blueprint,  but you are your proteins. 

Figure 15. The Central Dogma. The figure depicts the direction of information flow in living systems. The information encoded in DNA can flow back into DNA (replication), or from DNA to RNA (transcription) to protein (translation).