by Christoph — Sixty years ago Ja­cob, Bren­ner and Cuzin de­vised their 'Repli­con Model', in­spir­ing and use­ful guide­line for repli­ca­tion re­search ever since. Ac­cord­ing to the model, a 'Repli­con' is a ge­netic el­e­ment repli­cated from a sin­gle 'Repli­ca­tor' – repli­ca­tion ori­gin, in mod­ern terms – and repli­ca­tion is trig­gered by a pos­i­tive trans-act­ing fac­tor, the 'Ini­tia­tor'…