Word: amino
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...College of Physicians and Surgeons told how he filled a glass container with the gases that were presumably present in the earth's primitive atmosphere. Then he shot electric sparks through them to simulate lightning. In a week he had an organic soup in which he identified nine amino acids, four of which are constituents of proteins found in living organisms. Dr. Miller concluded that nature's first chemical step toward life creation was rather surprisingly easy...
Pauling's argument: molecular disease arises when defective genes cause the body to manufacture abnormal molecules. Up to i% of the 2,000,000 mental defectives in the U.S. suffer from phenylketo-nuria-a mental disease accompanied by the body's failure to oxidize an amino acid, phenylalanine, to tyrosine. Probable cause of the failure is a defective enzyme. The Pauling project: to find out the connection between the molecular and men tal defects, and also whether the other 99% or more of mental defectives owe their handicap to a similar molecular abnormality caused by a combination...
...oxytocin, which stimulates the uterus contractions of childbirth and starts the flow of milk. Then he took oxytocin apart and determined its chemical structure. Final step was to make it synthetically. This was an extremely difficult job, because oxytocin is a polypeptide, a protein-like compound made of eight amino acids, and probably the most complex substance ever synthesized. But Dr. du Vigneaud's synthetic hormone passed all tests, performing in living bodies exactly like the natural article...
...recommendation of AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss. When he moved to Washington with Leonor and their ten-year-old twin daughters, Libby brought along a truckload of scientific apparatus and set up a laboratory in the Carnegie Institution, where he works furiously on personal projects (his current interest: amino acids) whenever his work on the commission gives a moment of respite. "Science is like art," Libby explains. "You have to work at it or you go stale fast...
Last week the University of California announced that a team led by China-born Dr. C. H. Li has determined the complete molecular structure of ACTH. It turns out to be a straight chain of 39 amino acids arranged in a definite order. After satisfying themselves about the position of each link in the chain, Dr. Li and his teammates broke the chain in two, separating 28 of the links from the remaining eleven. The larger section proved to have all the desirable biological effects of the whole natural molecule. Better still, it lacks certain bad side effects...