Word: davison
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...microscope; yet within this basic unit of life exists an extraordinarily intricate chemical plant. In the cell's nucleus alone, scientists have identified more than 100 distinct chemical reactions that occur as the cell takes in food, grows and reproduces itself. Five years ago, Edward J. Davison, a computer specialist at the University of Toronto, began to translate these complex processes into a series of equations that were in effect a mathematical model of the nucleus of a cell. Now, having finally completed his model, Davison has used it to program a computer to duplicate some...
...Davison's computer cell not only "grows" when it is "fed" the right diet of chemicals, but acts up when it is mistreated. In a year of testing, for instance, Davison found that when he subjected his hypothetical cell to disturbances -the mathematical equivalent of a dose of cosmic rays, say, or a virus-it usually died. Sometimes, however, the disturbances affected the chemical reactions involved in the synthesis of messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid), which carries instructions from DNA, the master molecule of heredity, to the cell's protein-producing machinery. Under these conditions, the cell began...
...Davison's mathematical mutant tends to support what many molecular biologists already suspect: that malignancy is apparently linked to aberrations in the RNA. The nature of the deadly change in RNA remains a puzzle-in part because scientists find the study of chemical reactions on the cellular level so enormously difficult and timeconsuming. But if suspect reactions could first be tested in a computer, using a mathematical substitute for the cell, molecular biologists could perhaps achieve in a few seconds what normally might take them months in the laboratory. Thus Davison's computerized cell may some day provide...
...miracle that so many people did get out," said First Officer Davison. "The whole thing took no more than 90 seconds." Added Flight Engineer Pfrang: "I flew C-123s in Viet Nam, but I've never experienced anything that happened so fast or in which you were so helpless...
...told the passengers to crouch on the floor. Before he could order the 707's doors closed, a clean-shaven young man in a white sweater ran to the foot of the steps, a canister in his outstretched hand. "They're coming with grenades!" First Officer Robert Davison shouted. "Get the people out of here!" It was too late...