Word: kalckar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...didn't have a clue what a gene actually is. And with far more self-assurance than a newly minted 22-year-old Ph.D. had any right to possess, Watson decided he would figure it out. His first stop was Copenhagen for a postdoctoral fellowship with the biochemist Herman Kalckar, who was studying DNA's chemical properties. The fellowship ended in a hurry. "Herman," writes Watson in The Double Helix, "did not stimulate me in the slightest." Even worse, he decided Kalckar's research would not immediately lead to an understanding of the gene...
...Kalckar's greatest discovery came in the late 1930s in his study of intermediary metabolism, the complex set of reactions in the body by which food is broken down for energy and materials. With Fritz Lippmann, who received a Nobel Prize for the work, Kalckar presented the first evidence for the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as a result of biological oxidation...
...universal energy-carrying molecule, present in the living cells of all organisms. Kalckar's discovery formed the basis for understanding energy exchanges in biological systems...
...Kalckar premiered work in identifying the biochemical causes of disease. In one of the earliest cases in which the biochemistry of a disorder was analyzed, the researcher discovered the enzyme whose absence causes galactosemia, a genetic disorder which leads to severe mental handicaps and is characterized by an inability to use the sugar galactose...
After identifying the cause of the disease, Kalckar, working with Kurt Isselbacher, developed a test to detect the illness in the early development of infants. Their work provided a model that has led to the discovery and greater understanding of hundreds of genetic diseases...