Word: acidity
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Before such adventurous chemists as Gerhard Schramm even tried to manufacture nucleic acid, they had to understand how its giant molecules are put together, how they function as the essence of life on earth. Last week one American and two British scientists won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine for working out the complex structure of the most vital kind of nucleic acid, and for explaining how its structure enables it to control the heredity of all living creatures...
...laboratory flask, put water in the bottom to simulate the ocean, and shot electric sparks into it to do the work of the ancient lightning. When they analyzed the water, they found many an interesting chemical, some of them characteristic of living organisms, but they did not find nucleic acid, the essential substance at the heart of life...
Carefully avoiding life-made catalysts such as enzymes, he treated his chemical broth to moderate heat, pressure and other influences that were probably felt in the ancient ocean. Then he analyzed the product and found that it contained a simple nucleic acid. It met all chemical tests, and when its giant molecules were examined under a powerful electron microscope they showed evidence of the twisted, ropelike structure that is characteristic of natural nucleic acids...
...Schramm wants no one to assume-as some German newspapers have done-that he expects soon to create real living creatures in his laboratory. His synthetic nucleic acid is not alive; it is merely chemically similar to the giant molecules that cluster in the nuclei of living cells and enable them to reproduce their kind. But he has brought chemistry closer to the day when some resourceful researcher will put together a molecule that can lead a dim, synthetic life...
Until they won their joint award, just about the only thing the three researchers had in common was an interest in the molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the kind of nucleic acid that controls the reproduction of most living cells. California's famed chemist, Nobelman Linus Pauling, had suggested that this monster molecule, containing hundreds of thousands, or even millions of atoms, might be built in a spiral. Crick, Watson and Wilkins were among the many scientists who eagerly tested Pauling's theory...