Word: molecular
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...vastly enlarged the vistas of medical scientists, calling for heavy financial commitments and eventual massive infusions of government funding. It was this alliance of government, university laboratories and the private sector that became the driving force of the wave of invention and refinement that has ranged from the submicroscopic, molecular level of genetic engineering to the spectacular arena of major-organ replacements...
...revealed, medical scientists began as never before to focus their attention on the internal functioning of the cell and the myriad chemical interactions that are the essence of the activities of all living things. The new field of study soon established itself as a distinct scientific specialty, known as molecular biology, and grew so rapidly that some of the brightest young minds in the Western world began flocking to its bustling labs and classrooms...
Science, of course, adheres to no national boundary, but at various times one country or another has dominated the medical sciences for prolonged periods. Since World War II, the U.S. has held the lead not only in molecular biology but in all scientific accomplishment. In the mid-1950s, the U.S. government rapidly expanded the National Institutes of Health to underwrite and supplement the research of American biomedical scientists, many of whom have made their most important contributions while working in the nih laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland. One result of this strategy: since 1960, more than 50% of the winners...
...Thirty years down the line, we'll have identified a hundred or so genes that predispose to many common diseases," predicts Dr. Leroy Hood, chairman of the molecular-biology department at the University of Washington. "So we'll be able to do a genetic fingerprint showing your potential future health history, and we'll have preventive measures that can circumvent whatever limitations your genes impose on you." Looking even further ahead, Haseltine anticipates the use of genes "to regenerate, replace and repair what's broken...
...sticky cross-links, thus triggering the suicide sequence. By contrast, the taxoids--including taxol, the compound isolated from the bark of the yew tree that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a weapon against ovarian cancer in 1992--cause the same suicidal result by deactivating a molecular machine that, just before cell division, separates the DNA in each chromosome into two separate strands. Still other drugs known as topoisomerase-1 inhibitors block a slightly earlier step in the DNA replication process, the uncoiling of the double-stranded DNA molecule...