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After winning the Nobel Prize for helping to discover the structure of DNA, the master molecule of life, what does a scientist like Francis Crick do for an encore? He tackles something even bigger. With Leslie Orgel, of California's Salk Institute, Crick has now taken on the mystery of the origin of life. Writing in Icarus, a monthly devoted to studies of the solar system, the two scientists theorize that life on earth may have sprung from tiny organisms from a distant planet-sent here by spaceship as part of a deliberate act of seeding...
This bizarre-sounding theory, called "directed panspermia"* by its authors, results partly from uneasiness among scientists over current explanations about how life arose spontaneously on earth. Crick and Orgel note, for example, that the element molybdenum plays a key role in many enzymatic reactions that are important to life. Yet molybdenum is a rare element, much less abundant than, say, chromium or nickel -which are relatively unimportant in biochemical reactions. Thus, because the chemical composition of organisms "must reflect to some extent the composition of the environment in which they evolved," the authors suggest that earth life could have begun...
...priority of discovery. In his unusually candid book The Double Helix, Nobel Prizewinner James Watson confessed to another questionable practice. Determined to unravel the complex structure of the DNA molecule before Caltech's famed chemist Linus Pauling got to it, Watson and one of his co-winners, Francis Crick, deliberately withheld information from Pauling that might have helped their rival in the race for the Nobel...
That process, shown in the accompanying color chart, was summarized by Crick in a series of rules that became known as the Central Dogma. Most scientists interpreted the key rule of that dogma to be that genetic information flowed in one direction: from DNA to RNA to protein. To the surprise of many molecular biologists, however, it has recently been shown that part of the process can sometimes be reversed. This finding, in the opinion of molecular biologists like Columbia's Sol Spiegelman, may offer an important clue to the workings of cancer cells (see box, page...
...technical men who understand them. Even if government does enter the field, points out Daniel Callahan, much of the success of any ethical policy will depend on a responsible professional code. "If you depend solely on laws, sanctions and enforcements," says Callahan, "the game is over." Molecular Biologist Francis Crick is confident that basic morals and common sense will prevail. Some of the wilder genetic proposals will never be adopted, he claims, because "people will simply not stand for them...