Word: dna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DNA is likely to be the discovery made in the 20th century that will be the most important to the 21st. The world is just a few years away from deciphering the entire sequence of more than 100,000 human genes encoded by the 3 billion chemical pairs of our DNA. That will open the way to new drugs, genetic engineering and designer babies...
Watson had sketched out how four chemical bases paired to create a self-copying code at the core of the double-helix-shaped DNA molecule. In the more formal announcement of their discovery, a one-page paper in the journal Nature, they noted the significance in a famously understated sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." But they were less restrained when persuading Watson's sister to type up the paper for them. "We told her," Watson wrote in The Double Helix, "that...
...example, in the last weeks the HMS office has sent out releases about racial disparities among kidney donation recipients, triggers for Alzheimer's Disease and the cellular mechanisms that pry apart DNA...
...that's an awfully long time. How can information be stored so that it will be readable in a thousand years? How can we insure the vessel won't be lost or destroyed? Possible solutions ranged from shooting the capsule into outer space to embedding the information in cockroach DNA...
...announcement, the Human Genome Project is a public initiative that was started in 1990 and that involves a consortium of universities from around the world (it is financed in the United States by the National Institutes of Health). The ultimate goal is to map each and every segment of DNA that composes the 23 pairs of human chromosomes...