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"One of my hobbies is reading really old scientific papers. When I realized that uridine in RNA sets off immune cells, resulting in inflammation and interferon production, I wondered whether anyone had noticed this before. So I went back to the literature. Sure enough, I found a 1963 paper in which the authors reported that RNA isolated from mammalian cells does not induce the production of interferon (5). However, when the RNA was treated with nitrous acid, which deaminates all of the cytidines to uridines, it induced interferons. It gave me great pleasure to see that these researchers had stumbled upon this observation years before."
