Word: code
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ever since the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, biologists have believed the language of DNA to be rather like the Latin of the medieval church: universal, fundamental and indispensable. It seemed that all creatures, from men to mice to humble E. coli bacteria, shared the same basic instructions for making proteins, the building blocks of life; variations among organisms were thought to involve only the number and type of proteins that are strung together. Now researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have found species + that defy certain words in the genetic scripture: in the familiar Paramecium...
...every living cell, is shaped like a spiral staircase. Each step in the staircase is composed of a compatible pair of four different nucleotides, rep- resented by the letters A, T, G and C. Grouped into sets of three steps, the nucleotides are called codons, which dictate, or code for, the 20 amino acids, the subunits of protein. A few codons, or code words, serve as punctuation marks, telling the cellular machinery to start or stop adding amino acids to the growing protein chain...
...while studying the membrane of Paramecium that Biologist John Preer Jr. and his colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington stumbled onto the aberrant code. In the midst of the long sequences of Paramecium codons, they kept finding words that in most creatures read "stop." Yet in Paramecium, the word added another amino acid. Says Preer: "We thought it must be an error in our technique." However, news soon filtered over from the Centre de Genetique Moleculaire laboratory near Paris that scientists there were encountering the same anomaly. As the two groups report in a recent issue of the British journal...
...latest revelations challenge certain assumptions of the so-called code- frozen accident theory postulated by Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Crick proposed that the genetic code was essentially an accident of nature, which, once fixed a few billion years ago, would never change. Explains Preer: "It's hard to imagine how one code could evolve into another without jeopardizing the protein in the cell." Whatever the mechanism, the changes must have occurred very early on; some biologists suggest that the alterations may have been a ploy by one-celled creatures to resist viruses, which...
...Peepshow" is, in fact, the name of this painting, also entitled" Code 2," to indicate that is a part of Ahr's latest series, "Code" Ahr says he calls these works "painted structures [because] they're not just plain surfaces...