Word: coded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life has become a moving target over the years. Are we alive? Yes. Is a virus alive? Maybe. Still, a half-century after the discovery of the double helix, nobody doubts that it is our DNA that determines what we are - in the same way that lines of code determine software or the digital etchings on a CD determine the music you hear. Etch new signals, and you write a new song. That, in genetic terms, is what Venter has done. Working with only the four basic nucleotides that make up all DNA - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine...
...nowhere near as complex as creating larger, multicelled creatures - things with mobility, behavior, a purpose, a face. Those fanciful and frightful things are surely many years away and may prove too challenging and disturbing for society to allow. What Venter appears to have done, however, is crack the manufacturing code. Once you've done that, there may be little limit on what you can eventually build...
...mycoplasma at their own lab benches, they also took the opportunity to rewrite its genetic score. First, they introduced a mutation that would prevent it from causing disease. Then they branded it with a series of watermarks that would distinguish it as a product of their lab. Using a code built around selected genes, they spelled out five words that Venter coyly refuses to reveal, saying only that any molecular-biology study can suss them out and promising that there are no obscenities. The next step, which could happen in a matter of months, will be to insert the gene...
...plan, we'll throw in - absolutely free! - a $4,000 college-tuition tax credit. Plus, this special onetime offer: universal day care!" To be sure, the Republicans had their own special interests and slovenly hypocrisies - an avalanche of corporate tax breaks that made Swiss cheese out of the federal code - but they could always return to their big, clean public offer: freedom, strength, morality...
...Thompson's credit, that proposal and his detailed plans to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid, streamline government, expand free trade and reform the tax code were all meatier than anything his rivals bothered to produce. But Thompson was content to roll out his policies like basketballs and let other people pick them up and play with them. As TIME's Joe Klein wrote, Thompson seemed to be campaigning from a hammock, and his lack of urgency made him an easy target for late night hosts and Saturday Night Live skits...