Word: amino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Starvation is only one of the ways in which hunger kills. People whose bellies are full can still die of malnutrition if their diets lack certain essential elements. Lack of the proteins containing essential amino acids-found in milk, meat, fish, beans and nuts-can bring on kwashiorkor, a wasting disease that kills tens of thousands of children each year in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and parts of South America. Kwashiorkor victims, whose tissues are usually swollen with fluid, develop a scaly rash and liver troubles. They are most easily recognized by the characteristic that gave the disease its Ghanaian...
...headed by Dr. Leslie Iverson, 36, of the British Medical Research Council's Division of Neurochemical Pharmacology, has been studying the chemical changes in brains of Huntington's victims. The team has found that victims of the disease have lower-than-normal quantities of the transmitter gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) and occasionally-elevated amounts of dopamine. They are now trying to develop drugs that will restore the balance between these chemicals...
...into space. He speculates that those clouds may consist of rust-red organic compounds floating in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and ammonia coughed up by volcanic eruptions. Exposed to the sun's radiation, the gases could form into complex organic compounds, including sugars, purines and even amino acids. Such a mix of ingredients is akin to the primordial "soup" that is believed to have given rise to the first life on earth...
...chemistry prize, also worth $98,100, went to Christian Anfinsen, 56, of the National Institutes of Health, and Rockefeller University's Stanford Moore, 59, and William H. Stein, 61, for their work on enzymes. Made up of long, folded chains of amino acids, these proteins are essential intermediaries, or catalysts, in the body's vital chemical reactions. Anfinsen showed how the three-dimensional shape of an enzyme-critical to its role in those reactions-is dictated by the order in which its amino acids occur. Moore and Stein, studying the same enzyme-ribonuclease -ingeniously unraveled its sequence...
Assuming that antibodies, like most other proteins, are composed of chains of amino acids, Edelman set out to identify the arrangement and composition of the antibody molecules. In 1969, he completed a gamma-globulin model showing the molecule to be made up of 19,996 atoms grouped together in amino-acid building blocks. His findings coincided with those of Porter, showing that the antibody molecule is composed of a double pair of chains, two "light" ones forming the branches of the Y, and two "heavy" ones that make up the trunk. After establishing that antibodies have some flexible amino-acid...