Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...capital charge: Several lawyers called on to pontificate over Graham's fate brought up the recent case of a rape victim who positively identified her attacker and was absolutely sure of his identity. The alleged rapist was sentenced to life in prison - and was later was exonerated using DNA evidence. This kind of miscarriage speaks to psychological difficulties inherent in eyewitness accounts; if you're involved in a case (either directly or indirectly), you're understandably emotionally invested in seeing someone pay for the crime...
...might have been comfortable with McGinn's execution; his guilt in the murder of his 12-year-old stepdaughter was never in question. The only debate revolved around McGinn's guilt in the exacerbating crime (in this case, rape) that edged the murder into capital territory; his lawyers hoped DNA tests would erase the rape charge and take him off death row. The problem for Bush is that many of those same people may not have the stomach to watch Graham die. In fact, Graham's case is being held up around the country as a virtual point-by-point...
Indeed, every cell is a living example of nanotechnology: not only does it convert fuel into energy, but it also fabricates and pumps out proteins and enzymes according to the software encoded in its DNA. By recombining DNA from different species, genetic engineers have already learned to build new nanodevices--bacterial cells, for example, that pump out medically useful human hormones...
...DNA COMPUTER One of the most ingenious ideas being pursued is to compute using DNA, treating the double-stranded molecule as a kind of biological computer tape (except that instead of encoding 0s and 1s in binary, it uses the four nucleic acids, represented by A, T, C, G). This approach holds much promise for crunching big numbers. Hence large banks and institutions may one day use it. However, a DNA computer is an unwieldy contraption, consisting of a jungle of tubes of organic liquid, and is unlikely to replace a laptop in the near future...
...computer chips are immediately put to use developing the next generation of more powerful ones; this is the inexorable acceleration expressed as Moore's law. The same dynamic drives biotech and nanotech--even more so because all these technologies tend to accelerate one another. Computers are rapidly mapping the DNA in the human genome, and now DNA is being explored as a medium for computation. When nanobots are finally perfected, you can be sure that one of the first things they will do is make new and better nanobots...