Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many opportunities, so many cliffs to jump off--a new frontier of ethics, politics, religion and commerce. Centuries of philosophical arguments about free will are now twisted like that DNA strand. Are you truly free to be a size 6 if gluttony is in your genes? The nature-vs.-nurture debate changes when scientists find a gene that makes you shy, makes you reckless, makes you sad. For families haunted by generations of loss to cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease and sickle-cell anemia, prenatal testing may spare them a future as painful as the past...
...question: If an Australian biotech company creates a creature that is part human, part pig, what law would apply to it? Should a company be allowed to patent a cloned human embryo, then market its cells to help fight disease? What if the embryo is made of human DNA planted...
...different. The exact words don't matter that much because the fact is, they had done it. Earlier that day, the two scientists had pieced together the correct solution to a problem that researchers around the world were racing to solve. They had built a model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that showed by its very structure how DNA could be everything they fiercely believed it to be: the carrier of the genetic code and thus the key molecule of heredity, developmental biology and evolution. Watson and Crick weren't necessarily the smartest scientists in the contest (though they were plenty...
...time Watson arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1951, the brash and brilliant 23-year-old was obsessed with DNA. He had originally set out to become a naturalist (since childhood, he had had an interest in birds), but during his third year at the University of Chicago, Watson read a book titled What Is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics. Stepping boldly outside his field of expertise, Schrodinger argued that one of life's essential features is the storage and transmission of information--that is, a genetic code that passes from parent to child...
...birds to genetics and went to Indiana University in 1947 to study viruses, the simplest form of life on the planet and thus the one in which the code might be especially easy to find. By then, scientists had strong evidence that Schrodinger's genetic code was carried by DNA, thanks to a series of brilliant experiments on pneumococcal bacteria, first by Fred Griffith of the British Health Ministry and later by Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City...