Word: dna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Drexler was an M.I.T. undergraduate studying genetic engineering in the mid-1970s when he had his epiphany: if you could engineer DNA on a molecular level, why not build machines out of atoms, program them to build more machines and so on, until you had millions of infinitesimal nanobots, endlessly restocking the food supply, say, or swarming through the bloodstream eradicating disease, or building skyscrapers from industrial waste? If nanotech was viable, it promised a gleaming future of virtually limitless wealth and endlessly renewable resources...
Then, unexpectedly, he struck out when he proposed an implausible, three-chain helix for DNA. Several months later, in Cambridge, England, Francis Crick and I, apprehensive that Linus might bat again, found the double helix. Why Linus failed to hit this home run will never be known. His wife Ava Helen is said to have told Linus that he should have worked harder. I believe the decade following World War II may have had too many agonizing moments for the Pauling family...
...astonishing feat brought instant celebrity to Steptoe and his partner, Robert Edwards--as well as a barrage of criticism. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups denounced it as playing God, and even scientists like James Watson, unraveler of DNA, were worried about tinkering with a process as sacrosanct as procreation. But the debate faded as it became clear that the brave new world of babymaking that Steptoe had ushered in was providing a desperately sought service...
...basic research, for new therapies, to provide solutions to infertility or to "replace" a dying loved one. But medicine is also bound by the traditional precept to do no harm, and so it takes on added challenges--such as whether clones will die young because of their older DNA or whether they will suffer the environmental mutations picked up during the life of their adult parent...
...Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and, as James Watson later recalled, announced that "we had found the secret of life." Actually, they had. That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure--a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself--confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information...