Word: amino
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...first place, and that involves slowing the onset of osteoporosis, a disease that makes bones brittle. Among menopausal women, estrogen-replacement therapy has gained wide usage, despite its risks of depression and endometrial cancer. A newer treatment that received federal approval just last year involves the use of amino-bisphosphonates, a class of drugs that inhibit the cells that govern bone loss...
There is something to the panspermia theory, however. Even scientists who reject it acknowledge that some of life's building blocks probably had extraterrestrial origins. Indeed, they now believe that everything from organic chemicals to amino acids, the constituents of proteins, was carried in by the comets, asteroids and meteorites. And if life happened to form elsewhere in the solar system first, muses biochemist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, then it's at least possible that something more complex could have been included in the cargo--not necessarily a living organism but a molecular...
...acid, in a cloud of gas and dust named Sagittarius B2 North. Ammonia was discovered in interstellar space more than 25 years ago, which makes it plausible, according to one of the scientists on the Illinois team, that molecules of ammonia and acetic acid linked up to form basic amino acid. Amino acids, which are the basic building blocks of life, form the proteins and DNA that make up all living organisms. The Sagittarius cloud is believed to be similar to the cloud which formed our solar system. This latest discovery, according to the scientists, could back up the theory...
Wurtman says he and other MIT professors discovered in 1971 an amino acid called which small doses, secretes the hormone serotonin and thereby induces sleep. He says he thought this would be a good cure for insomnia and widely published the results...
...Wurtman says that since MIT did not patent the drug, no one else was allowed to do so, since only inventors can patent a product. A consequence of the lack of a patent, Wurtman says, was that no one could perform safety studies on the amino acid...