Word: dna
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Writing up their findings for the journal Nature, the famously brash Watson and Crick donned a British reserve. They capped a dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." They faced the question of byline: Watson and Crick, or Crick and Watson? They flipped a coin...
...double helix--both the book and the molecule--did nothing to slow this century's erosion of innocence. Watson's account, depicting researchers as competitive and spiteful--as human--helped de-deify scientists and bring cynicism to science writing. And DNA, once unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting. Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism--a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades of work on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies...
...practical and philosophical issues opened by the double helix continue to unfold, policy, philosophy and even religion will evolve in response. But one truth seems likely to endure, universal and immutable. It emerges with equal clarity whether you examine the DNA molecule or the way it was revealed. The secret of life is complementarity...
...life began is a grander question that will occupy most of the next century. The first task is to reconstruct the history of evolution over the past 4 billion years. Modern gene technology can use the DNA in every living thing as a vast repository of historical information. Even dna will not point all the way back to the beginning of life, but it will provide clues to the self-replicating entities first assembled from simple chemicals on the primeval earth. The century ahead will see the first laboratory proof that self-replicating systems can form from ordinary chemicals. Determining...
...British chemist Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photographs of DNA show that the molecule has a helical structure...