Word: atom
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last year Gray published his first book, New World Picture. It described current developments in physics from the inside of the atom to the bounds of the universe, traced their beginnings back to the stagnant period at the end of the 19th Century, won the approval even of such tough-minded critics as Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Review. In The Advancing Front of Science, Gray does not confine himself to physics. It is, he says, "an attempt to report news rather than summarize history." In it readers will find such various nuggets as the heredity...
Overgrown Atoms. Headliner of the convention was a round-faced, gum-chewing professor of Columbia University, Harold Clayton Urey, who won a Nobel Prize in 1934 for his spectrographic identification of deuterium, the doubleweight hydrogen atom which in combination with oxygen makes heavy water...
Heavyweight Detectives. Deuterium occurs in nature to the extent of one atom among 4,500 atoms of ordinary hydrogen. With modern apparatus if deuterium is present in quantities much greater than this proportion it can be detected. Thus if a man weighing 160 lb. drinks 20 drops of heavy water, the excess of deuterium will show in his urine. Biologists have been quick to see that, with two kinds of hydrogen atoms as distinct as red and green, a neat method was available for tracing the course of hydrogen-bearing compounds in body processes. Scientists in Germany have already found...
Some molecules are so small that they contain only one atom. Some are so large that they contain hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of atoms. Although they cannot be seen under the microscope, the giant, complex molecules of proteins are among the most important targets of current research in biological chemistry. Until recent years not much was known about them except that they were very big; that they contained carbon, hydrogen. oxygen, nitrogen and sometimes sulphur and phosphorus; that in such animal processes as digestion they were broken down by protein-wreckers called enzymes and that they were composed of polypeptide...
Then Svedberg, Wyckoff and others weighed & measured the giants by whirling them in powerful ultracentrifuges. Stanley found that the virus which causes tobacco mosaic disease in plants is a huge molecule, which was weighed by Svedberg and Wyckoff at 17,000,000 times as much as a hydrogen atom. The virus of noninfectious rabbit warts was isolated as a protein molecule weighing 20,000,000 units...