Word: ladder
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from a conscious, open acknowledgment that to be postmodern is also to be post-Marxist. In a time when people rise and fall freely, unhindered by traditional class structures, they become, according to Leigh, quite unhinged by their inability to locate themselves morally or emotionally on a sturdy social ladder...
...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...
...genius of DNA is the fact that A and T are mutually attractive, as are C and G. Consequently, when DNA separates during cell division, coming apart at the middle of each rung like a zipper opening, an exposed T half-rung on one side of the ladder will always attract an A floating freely in the cell. The corresponding A half-rung on the other section of the ladder will attract a floating T, and so on, until two double helixes, each identical to the original DNA molecule, are formed...
Even more remarkable, each of the four bases represents a letter in the genetic code. The three-letter "words" they spell, reading in sequence along either side of the ladder, are instructions to the cell on how to assemble amino acids into the proteins essential to the structure and life of its host. Each complete DNA "sentence" is a gene, a discrete segment of the DNA string responsible for ordering the production of a specific protein...
After Ford's defeat, Cheney returned to Wyoming, where in 1978 he won election to the state's sole congressional seat. His path to the Senate has been blocked -- Wyoming has two entrenched Republicans in Malcolm Wallop and Alan Simpson -- so Cheney has concentrated on climbing the House leadership ladder. Voted minority whip last December, he was considered a likely successor to minority leader Bob Michel. He defended the Reagan Administration during Congress's 1987 Iran-contra investigation and joined several G.O.P. colleagues in a harsh dissent from the panel's final report...