Word: gamow
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...still left unanswered one more question: How could DNA or RNA choose from among 20 amino acids to produce complex proteins by using an informational system that had only four code letters?the four bases?at its disposal? An answer to this intriguing problem was suggested by Physicist George Gamow, who likened the four bases to the different suits in a deck of playing cards...
...enough choices to encode 20 amino acids. If the cards are dealt in pairs, the number of combinations increases to 16 (since each card may combine with its own kind or one of three other suits). But such a two-unit system also would be inadequate. So Gamow reasoned that DNA's four bases had to be taken at least three at a time: this would yield 64 possible combinations (4 X 4 X 4), more than enough to code for the existing amino acids...
...CRICK'S team at Cambridge proved Gamow's ingenious "triplet" theory. They demonstrated that RNA formed from only one or two base units could not effect the manufacture of proteins. But when they added a third base unit, protein formation began immediately. It remained, however, for an unknown young biochemist named Marshall Nirenberg, at the National Institutes of Health, to crack the code itself. That same year Nirenberg had succeeded in building up short, synthetic strands of RNA out of only one type of base. Invariably, this artificial RNA induced the manufacture of chains of proteins consisting of only...
Died. George Gamow, 64, Russian-born theoretical physicist and astronomer; of a gastric hemorrhage; in Boulder, Colo. Although he worked in the arcane worlds of entropy and anti-numbers, Gamow had a rare gift for explaining science to the layman. While teaching at George Washington University, he put his clarity and common sense into nine books, including The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) and The Creation of the Universe...
...Gamow, George Biography of Physicists. (Harpers...