Word: biophysicist
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Biomimetic materials hold particular promise as coatings and wrappings that increase the body's tolerance of implanted devices. Eventually these substances may be put to work as nearly natural replacements for injured ligaments and arteries. University of Alabama molecular biophysicist Dan Urry, for example, has succeeded in turning a key segment of the protein elastin, present in many body tissues, into a material whose expansive and contractile properties closely approximate those of arterial walls. The material can be fashioned into tubes that feel, uncannily, like real blood vessels and also into sheets for encasing mechanical devices like pacemakers. Tests...
...this measure, complexity works, at least roughly. Computer simulations of ( life, the best-known application of the theory, create onscreen worlds of cyber-creatures that evolve in ways that eerily parallel real life. Biophysicist Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute says confidently, "Biological evolution proceeds at the boundary between order and chaos. If there is too much order, the system becomes frozen and cannot change. But if there is too much chaos, the system retains no memory of what went on before...
More imaginative approaches to drug development are essential. "What we need to do," says Dr. Fred Cohen, a biophysicist at the University of California at San Francisco, "is start selecting new targets based on our understanding of the biology of the organism." Already scientists are thinking up strategies for attacking the malarial parasite based on the knowledge that it lives off human red blood cells. Cohen is exploring ways of making hemoglobin appear unappetizing to the parasite, thereby causing it to starve to death...
...remedial work in the statistics of "averages" yourself. Just as some women are taller and stronger than some men, some are swifter at abstract algebra. Many of the pioneers in the field of X-ray crystallography -- which involves three- dimensional visualization and heavy doses of math -- were female, including biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was indispensable to the discovery of the double-helical structure...
DIED. Edith H. Quimby, 91, biophysicist whose research helped to pinpoint the optimal dosage of radiation for various medical purposes, particularly its use in cancer therapy; in New York City. Part of the atom bomb-building Manhattan Project during World War II, she was nonetheless a Cassandra who warned about the dangers of radiation as early as the 1920s...