Word: helix
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what a wondrous string it is. As 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...
FOOTNOTE: *A virus consisting largely of RNA, a single-stranded chain of bases similar to the DNA double helix...
Their mother says the children used few "formal" textbooks, but instead read novels and instruction manuals. Their favorite books include Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by Donald Harington, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, The Double Helix by James Watson and Homer's Iliad...
Forced to concoct a drama, Glashow chooses as his story the constant intersections of theory and observation that led to the currently held beliefs about the structure of the atom. Just as in The Double Helix, another popular scientific work about an abstract theory, the scientist's own life takes on great importance. Interactions goes beyond simply imparting Glashow's knowledge of elementary particle physics (the realm of quarks, strangeness, charm and color)in an effort to present what he terms a "scientific autobiography...
James Watson, co- discoverer of the DNA double helix, is named to head a new federal project: mapping the human genome...