Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...projects, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, were recognized, correctly, as the two most important players in the worldwide effort to spell out the 3 billion "letters" of the human genome--the biochemical recipe, encoded in our DNA, for manufacturing and operating a complete human being...
...complex species evolved from simpler ones--and even pinpoint the precise bits of genetic information that are uniquely human. "It has to be a milestone in human history when you have a first look at your instruction book," says James Watson, who with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA a half-century ago. "Having this book will change the world...
...landed at the National Institutes of Health, where he began trying to locate and decode a gene that governs production of a brain-cell protein. The work was agonizingly slow, and when he heard about a computerized machine that used lasers to automatically identify the chemical letters in DNA, he went out and bought a prototype--even though his NIH bosses wouldn...
...that purchase became a symbol of Venter's disdain for authority, the new technique he developed for finding genes with it demonstrated his brilliance. By focusing on those bits of DNA that were actually doing something--as opposed to the long strings that had no obvious function--he was able to tag the relevant parts and decode them. These "expressed-sequence tags" enabled Venter to start identifying genes at a hitherto unimaginable pace...
...Corn started off as a small grassy plant with an inch-long fruit. Native-Americans and later, mid-western farmers manipulated the plant's genetic code to increase the size of the fruit and make the plant more hardy. These genetic modifications, of course, happened before any understanding of DNA...