Word: helix
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week a scientist whose work has helped to make engineering-and even creation-of life a possibility tackled this dilemma head on. Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, the master molecule DNA, urged that doctors attending the birth of laboratory-conceived human babies be given the right to terminate the lives of the infants if they are grossly abnormal...
...competition for the Nobel Prize and the other honors that follow in its wake. This is apparent in the pell-mell rush to publish results of experiments-some of them later proved faulty-in scientific journals just to establish priority of discovery. In his unusually candid book The Double Helix, Nobel Prizewinner James Watson confessed to another questionable practice. Determined to unravel the complex structure of the DNA molecule before Caltech's famed chemist Linus Pauling got to it, Watson and one of his co-winners, Francis Crick, deliberately withheld information from Pauling that might have helped their rival...
...Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving investigation continued to twist like a whodunit written on a helix, the editors realized that a cover story on Irving was in the offing. Which artist should paint de portrait? The ideally ironic choice seemed to be Elmyr de Hory, Irving's neighbor on the Balearic isle of Ibiza and the subject of Fake!, Irving's book about a master art forger...
...thought I knew a lot of things: of enzymes and mutation, Of cells, the nuclei, RH-electrodes and gestation. But now there's double helix, DNA and ribosomes, With biological syntliesis-and not just one's chromosomes. Instead of simple worries, such as merely being stoned, I've got to face a future now in which I may get cloned. Alas Homo futurus! There's lots more to learn, it seems. I thought one told the boys from girls by lowering their genes...
...experiment also revealed two startling similarities between the virus-like particles and tumor-causing RNA viruses: both have the same density and both share the ability to reverse the normal order of genetic transmission. Spiegelman's and Schlom's conclusion is crucial. Normally, DNA, the double-helix master molecule, produces RNA, which carries genetic information to the cell (TIME, April 19). But tumor viruses can use their own RNA to produce DNA, which may trigger the cancerous growth that is perpetuated in succeeding cell generations as the affected cell replicates and divides...