Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...desire to help speed up human genetics that drove me in 1986 to become an early partisan of the Human Genome Project, whose ultimate objective was to sequence the roughly 3 billion DNA letters that comprise our genetic code. Though many young hot-shots argued that the time for the project had not yet arrived, those of us a generation older were seeing at too close hand our parents and spouses falling victim to diseases of genetic predisposition. And virtually all of us knew couples rearing children whose future was clouded by a bad throw of the genetic dice...
Although proteins are the direct result of the instructions coded in our DNA, they are far more variegated and complex than DNA. They have to be. Every chemical reaction essential to life depends in one way or another on their services. Proteins are the beams and rafters of the cell and the glue that binds the body together; they're the hormones that course through our veins and the guided missiles that target infections; they're the enzymes that build up and break down our energy reserves and the circuits that power movement and thought...
None of us so privileged few who first saw the double helix in the spring of 1953 ever contemplated that we might in our lifetime see it completely decoded. All our dreams at the time centered on the next big objective--finding how the four letters of the DNA alphabet (A, T, G and C) spell out the linear sequences of amino acids in the synthesis of proteins, the main actors in the drama of cellular life. As it turns out, the essence of the genetic code and of the molecular machinery that reads it was solidly established...
Then the creative juices of science turned to how to read the messages of DNA. To our surprise, Frederick Sanger at Cambridge University and Walter Gilbert at Harvard, working independently, needed less than a decade to develop powerful methods for determining the order of DNA letters. At roughly the same time, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen devised elegantly simple procedures for cutting and rejoining DNA molecules to produce "recombinant DNA...
Then voices of doom proclaimed that these procedures would create life forms as threatening to our existence as nuclear weapons. Such false alarms held us back only a few years, however. By 1980 the immense powers of recombinant DNA were let loose for the public good. Soon they were to change irreversibly the faces of biology and medicine and bring modern biotechnology into existence...