  The theory of stochastic transcription termination based on free-energy
competition requires two or more reaction rates to be delicately balanced over
a wide range of physical conditions. A large body of work on glasses and large
molecules suggests that this should be impossible in such a large system in the
absence of a new organizing principle of matter. We review the experimental
literature of termination and find no evidence for such a principle but many
troubling inconsistencies, most notably anomalous memory effects. These suggest
that termination has a deterministic component and may conceivably be not
stochastic at all. We find that a key experiment by Wilson and von Hippel
allegedly refuting deterministic termination was an incorrectly analyzed
regulatory effect of Mg2+ binding.
