Word: acids
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...about the unknown risks of genetic engineering. The wrangling has been public, and traditional scientific courtesy has all but vanished. Infuriated by unreasoning opposition to the new discoveries, James Watson-who, with Francis Crick, won a Nobel Prize for determining the double-helix structure of the DNA (for deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule-has labeled the critics "kooks," "shits" and "incompetents." One of his targets is fellow Nobel Laureate George Wald, who has supported efforts to ban recombinant DNA research at Harvard and M.I.T. Wald contends that instead of trying to find the roots of cancer, for example, through genetic research, society...
...coli under control. The microbes must be able to manufacture a protective membrane; without such an outer coat they would swell and burst during normal growth. To keep them from manufacturing a complete coat, Curtiss created an E. coli with a defect in a gene that makes diaminopimelic acid (DAP), an important ingredient of the membrane. The defect made the bugs dependent for their survival upon DAP supplied by scientists...
...gene involved in DAP production. These newly designed bugs remained DAPless. But more frustration awaited Curtiss: the mutants managed to survive and multiply even without DAP. How? Dennis Pereira, a graduate student who worked with Curtiss on the project, discovered that they were producing a sticky substance called colanic acid that held them together in the absence of their normal outer coat. By manipulating still another of the microbe's genes, Curtiss and Pereira deprived the bug of its ability to make colanic acid. That change provided an unexpected dividend; it also made the already sickly microbe extremely sensitive...
...massive job of collating all the information and feeding it into a computer at the federally run Oak Ridge Energy Center, where it will be available to anyone who wants it. Already some interesting findings have turned up. For example, German scientists discovered a method of capturing the sulfuric acid released by coal when it is turned into oil; that could point to an important pollution-control technique...
...that the nucleotides, or "letters," of the genetic message are arranged. These patterns could have arisen, they found, if primitive tRNA molecules each had five nucleotides interacting with the genetic message instead of the three that now do. With five nucleotides, tRNA molecules-each lugging along its distinctive amino acid-could link up firmly with a messenger RNA molecule (which brings the genetic instructions from the DNA molecule). The amino acids could thus be assembled into the appropriate protein without the aid of a ribosome. Contemporary tRNA molecules, unaided, cannot form a stable linkage with messenger RNA; a ribosome...