Word: geneticists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Doctors diagnose Fragile X by using a microscope to examine X chromosomes isolated from white blood cells. The defective site is often clearly visible at the end of one of the chromosome's arms. Last year a more accurate diagnostic test was devised by Geneticist W. Ted Brown, of the New York State Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities (IBR) on Staten Island. Brown's team uses a technique in which snippets of DNA taken from the X chromosomes of people suspected of having the condition are compared with snippets from their normal relatives...
...test involves comparing the DNA of blood, semen or hair roots found at the scene with the DNA of a suspect. What makes it virtually foolproof is that no two people (other than identical twins) have the same genetic characteristics. While considering this fact in 1983, Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist at the University of Leicester in England, realized it might be the basis for an important new tool in criminal investigations. Using restriction enzymes as "scissors," he cut the DNA taken from several people into segments and arranged them into patterns that somewhat resemble the bar codes found on supermarket...
...rather oblique direction. UCSD Biochemist Marlene DeLuca has been investigating for 20 years how the firefly protein -- in this case, an enzyme called luciferase -- produces light. But the process of collecting and grinding up fireflies to extract the enzyme was laborious and costly. She and Donald Helinski, a molecular geneticist, decided to isolate the luciferase gene, cloning exact copies of it and splicing it into the genetic machinery of the common bacterium E. coli. The E. coli could then massproduce luciferase by the vat. DeLuca and Helinski accomplished this task by using standard recombinant DNA techniques developed over the past...
...Microbiologist Alex Goldfarb, then 28, was among the fortunate Jews in the Soviet Union allowed to emigrate. He became an assistant professor at the Julius and Armand Hammer Health Sciences Center at Columbia University in New York City. After his father David, a geneticist with a worldwide reputation, retired in 1979, he was eventually told that he too could leave the Soviet Union...
Certain types of cancer seem to run in some families, and in the early 1970s a geneticist named Alfred Knudson came up with one explanation: genes that normally protect against the cancer somehow get lost or damaged. Other scientists suggested that these genes serve as "off" switches, restraining cells from replicating ceaselessly and forming malignancies. If the switches are not inherited or are somehow disabled by, say, radiation, chemicals or viruses, cancerous growth might start. Logical enough; but as years passed without hard evidence, people questioned whether such genes existed...