Word: ende
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Watson and Crick discovered in 1953, DNA consists of a double helix, resembling a twisted ladder with sidepieces made of sugar and phosphates and closely spaced connecting rungs. Each rung is called a base pair because it consists of a pair of complementary chemicals called nitrogenous bases, attached end to end, either adenine (A) joined to thymine (T) or cytosine (C) attached to guanine...
...rope that was maybe 2 in. in diameter and 32,000 miles long, all neatly arranged inside a structure the size of a superdome. When the appropriate signal comes, you have to unwind the rope, which consists of two strands, and copy each strand so you end up with two new ropes that again have to fold up. The machinery to do that cannot be trivial...
...some 5,000 people, all of them descendants of a woman who died of Huntington's $ disease a century ago. Working with DNA samples from affected family members, Gusella and Wexler in 1983 concluded that they had indeed found a Huntington's marker, which was located near one end of chromosome...
...solution is automation. "It will improve accuracy," says Stanford's Paul Berg. "It will remove boredom; it will accomplish what we want in the end." The drive for automation has already begun; a machine designed by Caltech biologist Leroy Hood can now sequence 16,000 base pairs a day. But Hood, a member of the Genome Advisory Committee, is hardly satisfied. "Before we can seriously take on the genome initiative," he says, "we will want to do 100,000 to a million a day." The cost, he hopes, will eventually drop to a penny per base pair...
...geneticist at Johns Hopkins University, was in the game much earlier. He has been cataloging genes since 1959, compiling findings in his regularly updated publication, Mendelian Inheritance in Man. In August 1987 he introduced an electronic version that scientists around the world can tap into by computer. At the end of December it contained information on all the 4,550 genes identified to date. Says McKusick: "That's an impressive figure, but we still have a long way to go." Several other libraries of genetic information are already functioning, among them GenBank at the Los Alamos National Laboratory...