The 1998 paper leaves much to be desired. Its deficiencies reflect the excitement of the first hour. The state of the art at that time may be gleaned from an authoritative paper that came to the opposite conclusion: A.R. Mushegian and E.V. Koonin “Gene order is not conserved in bacterial evolution”. TIG 1996, 12, 289–290. The gene cluster table of 1998 was mainly retrieved from the annotations in published genomes and constructed manually with paper and pencil. The state of information technology at that time is reflcted by the fact that the table was folded an individually pasted by hand into each issue by the publisher.
Round 1: and Author Response The manuscript comprises an exciting account on the origin of life with emphasis on the emergence and function of RNA.