Word: molecular
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unraveling of the DNA double helix was one of the great events in science, comparable to the splitting of the atom or the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It also marked the maturation of a bold new science: molecular biology. Under this probing discipline, man could at last explore-and understand-living things at their most fundamental level: that of their atoms and molecules...
...Molecular biology, in part, is rooted in the science of genetics. Ever since Cro-Magnon man, parents have probably wondered why their children resemble them. But not until an obscure Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel began planting peas in his monastery's garden in the mid-19th century were the universal laws of heredity worked out. By tallying up the variations in the offspring peas, Mendel determined that traits are passed from generation to generation with mathematical precision in small, separate packets, which became known as genes (from the Greek word for race...
...coils of DNA and control how the molecule replicates. Nobel Laureates David Baltimore of M.I.T. and Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin reported on the use of viruses, which are little more than coils of nucleic acid wrapped in protein, to transfer new DNA or its molecular cousin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), into bacterial cells. In the process, the cells are genetically transformed...
...Mark Ptashne, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, summer was just a time to continue things; the research that he does during the year and an annual month at an Italian music school, studying the violin...
...produce cancer in normal cells. Teams at M.i.T. and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., reported that they could induce cancer in normal rat cells only by inserting at least two types of oncogenes into the cells. "A single oncogene produced some changes, but not cancer," explained Molecular Biologist Robert Weinberg of M.I.T. "It took two genes acting cooperatively to produce a tumor. In other cases, it might take three or more...