Thank God the Russkies Didn’t Crack it First:
The Genetic Code.

By 1961, scientists had figured out that you could grind up cells and separate their components by centrifugation into various fractions. In one such fraction, or lysate,  you ended up with mostly cytoplasmic proteins and some ribosomes. If you added mRNA to such a lysate, the ribosomes would translate that mRNA into protein for you (as long as you provided a little raw material in the form of amino acids and a little energy in the form of ATP). This process became known as in vitro translation. It’s still widely used in molecular biology, and in an early issue your Old Quantum Butcher suggested that it might be used to bootstrap the fledgling science of nanotechnology. In 1961, however, in vitro translation offered a way to crack the genetic code.