Word: amino
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brainwasher on Tap. The next thing was to learn whether mental function can be chemically controlled. It can, said Dr. Hyden. Small doses of a new synthetic substance called tricyano-amino-propene ("triap") caused drastic changes in neuronal RNA and proteins in animals-and, according to preliminary studies...
...difficulty was that the ACTH molecule is a protein, a long chain of amino acid groups linked together in a special sequence like a phrase in telegraphic code. If the code is not reproduced properly, synthetic ACTH will not do the magical things in the human body that natural ACTH does. Natural ACTH has 39 amino acid groups. Dr. Hofmann's synthetic copy has only 23, but this part of the chain seems to function biologically as well as the whole-somewhat as if a coded message were pruned of unnecessary words before being sent...
Nature's next step toward life must have been to make proteins out of accumulated amino acids. Reasoning that parts of the primitive earth's surface may have been fairly hot, Dr. Fox mixed together the 18 amino acids common to the proteins of all living organisms and heated them gently. He got "proteinoids" that behave very much like proteins found in nature. They are digested by natural enzymes and eaten by bacteria. If polyphosphoric acid is added to the mix, the reaction takes place at only 160° F., well below the boiling point of water...
...dividing. How did nature make cells, with their permeable walls and juicy insides, out of assorted protein molecules? Dr. Fox does not think this is difficult; he has done something very like it himself. He dissolved in hot water some of the proteinoids that he made by heating amino acids. When he cooled the solution, billions of microspheres appeared, about the size of cocci (round bacteria) and looking very much like them. They shrink when salt is added, and this suggests that they are hollow and that their walls are slightly permeable like the cell walls of bacteria...
...does not claim that his microspheres are alive, but he thinks that something like them may have been a step in nature's progression toward life. If amino acids were continually raining down from the sky, it is natural to suppose that considerable quantities of them accumulated on fairly hot parts of the young earth's surface. The heat made them react, as in Dr. Fox's lab; after they had turned into proteinlike molecules, heavy rain dissolved them and washed them into the sea. There they cooled and formed microspheres, each of which packaged together...