Introns: the war of hypotheses

biologists were taken aback by the discovery in 1977 that genes came in bits and pieces. It was found that in practically every higher organism, a dna sequence that constituted a gene was made up of two sub-units: exons (working parts of a gene that encoded a protein) and introns (intervening portions that separated exons).

Exons were spliced together to generate functional messages after the introns