Word: dna
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nothing less than to explain the inner chemical workings of living creatures. Every living cell, including those of multicelled animals such as man, has in its nucleus large and complicated molecules that control growth and heredity. Except in some bacteria and viruses, these molecules are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which James Watson of Harvard and Francis Crick of Cambridge, England, found to be two long chains of atoms linked together and twisted spirally. The links between the two spirals, often many thousands of them, differ slightly and constitute a sort of code that carries information and controls the heredity...
...Britain's Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick, and U.S. Biologist James D. Watson, for studies of the structure of the deoxyribonucleic (DNA) acid molecule, one of the principal elements in cell metabolism and in transmission of inheritable characteristics...
Knowledge of RNA may lead to understanding of DNA-and few prospects are so likely to thrill the present-day biological, chemical or physical scientist, since in DNA lies the secret of heredity and its illnesses, and of life's very nature. Last week came a significant whiff of success in the study...
...Like DNA, the RNA molecule has four different chemical groups-called bases -strung along it in sequences like the peaks and notches on a Yale kev. Biologists are convinced that the bases make up a genetic code of four letters-in roughly the same sense that the Morse code of telegraphy has three letters...
...Rosetta Stone for the language of life.'' If applied to many mutant viruses, they may break entire genetic codes, telling which groups of bases are responsible for what characteristics. The next step, perhaps years away, will be to do the same with the more complicated molecules of DNA that govern the heredity of higher animals. At some point during this effort...