Word: biochemist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years in the making with strange, new man-made bugs. Asks Biologist Robert Sinsheimer, chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz: "Do we really wish to replace the fateful but impartial workings of chance with the purposeful self-interested workings of human will?" Even more dourly. Biochemist Erwin Chargaff notes: "If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even...
...only do creative people challenge basic assumptions, they discern previously unseen patterns. This, according to biochemist Calvin, is one of the most important abilities of the scientist. Gregor Mendel, cross-breeding peas in a monastery, noticed a pattern and extended the understanding of heredity. "It's no trick at all," Calvin notes, "to get the right answer when you have all the data. The real creative trick is to get the right answer when you have only half the data, and half of that is wrong...
...individual scientist symbolized the new maturity of this arcane art more than Herbert Boyer, 44, a curly-topped, rumpled-looking biochemist at the University of California at San Francisco. In the 1960s Boyer was taking part in antiwar protests in the streets of Berkeley. Last year he led a different type of demonstration: the parade of scientists who are taking gene engineering out of the laboratory and into the marketplace, where it promises a host of wonders, from new drugs and foodstuffs to pollution-gobbling bugs...
Under the direction of Biochemist Robert Bandurski, M.S.U. botanists will try to germinate the remaining 1980 seeds One method they will use is vernalization, in which the transition from winter to spring is re-created by refrigerating the seeds briefly before exposing them again to warmth and light. The seedlings will be nurtured until they produce seeds of their own, in the hope that the progeny will offer clues about the mutating effects of 100 years' exposure to the natural radiation in the soil. Enough bottles remain buried to carry on Beal's experiment until 2040. More time...
...Biochemist Ronald Cape, chairman of Berkeley's Cetus Corp., a rival firm, sees patents as increasing the "free flow of ideas." More companies and investors are sure to plunge into the expensive business with less fear of having ideas stolen, or at least with an assurance of legal recourse if they are. But others fear that just the opposite will happen: that scientists will be cautious about sharing information, long an essential part of the scientific process. Warns M.I.T.'s Jonathan A. King, a molecular biologist: "Now you have the prospect of keeping a strain [of bacteria...