Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Working with a bacterium and a pond-dwelling protozoan, Altman, 50, and Cech, 41, independently discovered that RNA can act as an enzyme, a molecule that accelerates chemical reactions a millionfold or more and makes it possible for life to exist. Plants, for example, depend on enzymes to convert carbon dioxide in the air to sugar and starch. An enzyme in human saliva helps transform starch into glucose, the body's energy source. Until RNA enzymes were identified, all enzymes were thought to be proteins...
...have depended solely on DNA, the principal carrier of hereditary information in plants, animals and bacteria. "Now that we know that RNA can both carry genetic information and serve as a catalyst," Cech wrote last year, "it seems possible that it was the key molecule at the origin of life...
...only last July that pro-life forces were cheering themselves hoarse? After years of battling in the streets, the legislatures and the courts, they had won their greatest victory: a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Inc. that gives states enhanced power to restrict abortions. It was only a matter of time, pro-lifers predicted, before abortions were severely restricted, if not banned...
...Washington, where they rarely think of anything else, enough Congressmen read the political winds to hand right-to-lifers another reversal on the very day the Florida session ended. After voting for eight straight years to ban Medicaid funding for abortions except when the mother's life is in danger, the House voted 216 to 206 to allow payments for poor women who become pregnant through rape or incest. Twenty-six House members who opposed such funding in 1988 changed sides...
...pregnancies that ended in abortion last year. Only about one-quarter of those women -- roughly 4,000 -- were poor enough to qualify for Medicaid payments. Though Bush is hinting that his position is negotiable, he is on record as promising to veto the measure, a gesture to the pro-life groups he has been courting since he switched to their camp after joining the Reagan ticket...