Word: molecular
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just like all other living beings, evolved the way he did by pure chance. Man's development and his histories similarly are neither mysterious nor predictable: they are, however, explicable: man's emotions and capacities have been predisposed, built into his chemical and genetic makeup, all by random molecular events...
Jacques Monod, a Nobel Prize winner in Biology, helped formulate some of the original discoveries in molecular biology dealing with DNA replication and protein synthesis. More recent discoveries in the field have clearly illuminated the basic biochemical manner in which genetic materials are replicated and translated inside living tissue. Chance and Necessity reviews this information, describing the molecular structures in a fairly non-technical fashion. Monod hypothesizes how the nucleic acids might have originated as the information carrier molecule, suggests that the genetic code may have come into being purely randomly, and even suggests a mechanism for DNA-protein specificity...
...group's latest interest has been an enzyme called subtilisin, which is found in ordinary soil bacteria. As they investigated subtilisin's complex structure, the scientists realized that it had a curious similarity to another enzyme, chymotrypsin, common to all vertebrates, including man. While the overall molecular architecture of the two enzymes is quite different, they both have three identical groups of amino acids that form what Kraut calls their "business ends." It is at these spots that the chemicals involved in vital reactions are brought together...
Borrowing a phrase from classical biology, Kraut calls the discovery the first known instance of "convergent evolution" on the molecular scale. In other words, "nature has invented the same piece of molecular machinery to do a particular job in two separate and independent instances." Kraut speculates that this convergence in the evolution of the enzymes is more than a coincidence. The genetic code and the basic building blocks of life (amino acids and proteins) are already known to be universal, he says. Thus Kraut's discovery is further evidence of what may eventually be accepted as a scientific fact...
...other nations gained was re-emphasized last week when the latest Nobel prizes in science went to two refugees from Hitler: Dennis Gabor, who won the 1971 prize in physics for his invention of holography, and Gerhard Herzberg, who earned the laurels in chemistry for his pioneering work in molecular spectroscopy...