Word: biochemist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Drosophila melanogaster, Morgan and his students were able to map the relative positions of the genes along the insect's four pairs of chromosomes. Still, the gene's physical nature remained as great a mystery as ever. DNA had been discovered in the nuclei of cells by the Swiss biochemist Friedrich Miescher a few years after Mendel did his work on peas. But since the chromosomes in which the DNA was found also contained proteins?the basic building blocks of life?few scientists had any inkling that DNA might be playing an even more central role to life...
...were practiced to win the great prize. Out of Pauling's earlier work, Watson and Crick got the idea that the extremely long and complicated DNA molecule might take the shape of a helix, or spiral. From the X-ray crystallography laboratory at King's College in London, where Biochemist Maurice Wilkins was also investigating the molecule's structure, they quietly obtained unpublished X-ray data on DNA. Relying as much on luck as logic, they constructed Tinkertoy-like molecular models out of wire and other metal parts. To everyone's astonishment, they suddenly produced a DNA model that...
...CRICK'S team at Cambridge proved Gamow's ingenious "triplet" theory. They demonstrated that RNA formed from only one or two base units could not effect the manufacture of proteins. But when they added a third base unit, protein formation began immediately. It remained, however, for an unknown young biochemist named Marshall Nirenberg, at the National Institutes of Health, to crack the code itself. That same year Nirenberg had succeeded in building up short, synthetic strands of RNA out of only one type of base. Invariably, this artificial RNA induced the manufacture of chains of proteins consisting of only...
...would such genetic repetition help man? Some theorists suspect that the "spare" DNA plays a regulatory role, perhaps switching other genes on and off at just the right moment during the involved process of protein manufacturing. Harvard Biochemist Charles Thomas, however, supports a more radical idea. He thinks that the repeated segments are actually "slaves" of a "master" gene from which they have been copied. Working in tandem, explains Thomas, such "slaves" could produce proteins more quickly and efficiently?though, he admits, not necessarily in greater diversity...
AVENUES OTHER THAN virology are also being explored in the search for a cancer cure. Researchers have long been aware that animal cells growing in a culture medium will stop multiplying once they come in contact with one another. But in some recent experiments at Princeton, Biochemist Max Burger found that when he stripped normal mouse cells of their membranes, they continued to grow wildly?as do cancer cells?even after they had touched. Burger thus speculates that the loss of a cell's protective coating, possibly as a result of viral infection, could lead to cancer by exposing...