Word: molecular
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...because none of them will actually wind up in the body. At this early stage, investigators aren't so much developing cures as creating research and manufacturing techniques. For that, the specific cell lines aren't important. "This will enable the biomedical community to iron out the molecular biology of these cells," says Dr. Thomas Okarma, CEO of the biotech firm Geron, which finances stem-cell pioneer James Thomson as well as John Gearhart, "and that doesn't turn on one cell line vs. another...
...drug designers around the world. Brown uses microarrays to compare the genetic script in healthy cells with the script in diseased cells, and he recently discovered that several malignancies assumed to be the result of a specific cancer were actually two or more distinct cancers when viewed on a molecular level. "It was like thinking a stomachache has only one cause," Brown says. "Recognizing the distinctions makes it possible for us to do a better job of treating these cancers...
What that "something" was became clear in the past decade as scientists began to see at the molecular level precisely what pushes a normal cell to become malignant. As more and more genetic mutations were linked to various types of cancers, researchers could see patterns of genetic changes that permit cells to grow into tumors. If doctors could identify the steps that a cell has to go through to become cancerous, Sidransky reasoned, they might be able to pick up a budding tumor's malignant imprints along the way--tracking cancer as it develops, from start to finish...
...living cell bustles with molecular activity. Lilliputian protein motors ferry goods and services. Enzymes curl and unfurl. Even on its calmest days, the DNA double-helix twists, unwinds and wiggles like a loopy spring...
Breaking this molecular hullabaloo into its elemental physical forces is Carlos Bustamante's specialty. Bustamante, 50, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, came to the U.S. from Peru 26 years ago as a Fulbright scholar. In the early 1990s, while at the University of Oregon, he and his colleagues tacked one end of a DNA molecule to a magnetic bead and measured its elasticity by tugging at the bead with magnets. A stroke of genius, no doubt, but to what end? "We didn't quite know how to answer that question at the time...