Word: molecular
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Until recently, Dr. Comfort doubted that these built-in instructions could soon be altered, or the components made to last longer. Because of advances in genetics and molecular biology, however, he now believes that some method to reduce the rate of aging and to extend vigorous life by at least 15 years will be discovered within the next two decades. This extension would be in addition to the roughly five-to-seven-year increase in average life expectancy that will take place when medicine conquers cancer and vascular diseases...
...more than a decade, most scientists have accepted the "central dogma" of molecular biology without question. Stated simply, that dogma holds that the heredity information in living cells is always passed along in the same direction: from the "double helix" DNA molecule to the single-stranded messenger RNA molecule, which in turn directs the synthesis of protein-which is essential to all life. Since the end of May, however, investigators at three separate laboratories have stunned the scientific community by revealing that the central dogma is contradicted by the activities of cancer-producing viruses...
...M.I.T. published back-to-back papers in the journal Nature offering experimental evidence that RNA viruses causing cancer in animals are capable of assembling their own DNA. Their work was quickly confirmed by Sol Spiegelman, head of Columbia University's Institute for Cancer Research and one of molecular biology's most brilliant experimenters...
Endless Variety. At the University of Wisconsin, a group headed by a distinguished Indian-born molecular biologist, Har Gobind Khorana. 47, reported that it had achieved the first artificial synthesis of a gene-the basic unit of heredity in the nuclei of all cells. Although genetic material has been made in the laboratory before, scientists have always had to use at least some natural cellular material in the process. The Wisconsin achievement marks the first time that a single gene has been created entirely out of off-the-shelf chemicals...
...molecule are linked by "steps" composed of pairs of mutually attracting chemicals, or bases, called nucleotides. DNA contains only four different kinds of nucleotides, but they can be arranged in an endless variety of complex sequences. Each complete sequence-some including thousands of steps on the molecular staircase-is a single gene containing a coded message of heredity. With that message, the gene can order the cell to produce one of the untold number of proteins out of which all living organisms are made...