Word: molecular
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...naked eye it looks just like water. But when it is stirred, the "water" turns out - to be as sticky as molasses, clinging to a glass rod and forming long, hair- thin threads. "You get the feeling this is really different stuff," says Dr. Francis Collins in his molecular-biology laboratory at the National Institutes of Health. Collins heads a mammoth effort to catalog the library of biological data locked in those threads, a challenge he compares, not inaccurately, with splitting the atom or going to the moon...
...French Anderson looks at the same clear liquid and sees not a library but a pharmacy. Anderson's goal, his obsession, is to find the wonder drugs hidden in that test tube. Someday, he says, doctors will simply diagnose their patients' illnesses, give them the proper snippets of molecular thread and send them home cured...
What they and other researchers are plotting is nothing less than a biomedical revolution. Like Silicon Valley pirates reverse-engineering a computer chip to steal a competitor's secrets, genetic engineers are decoding life's molecular secrets and trying to use that knowledge to reverse the natural course of disease. DNA in their hands has become both a blueprint and a drug, a pharmacological substance of extraordinary potency that can treat not just symptoms or the diseases that cause them but also the imperfections in DNA that make people susceptible to a disease...
...just the location of 100,000 or so genes, but the exact sequence of their constituent chemical parts. If the human genome is an encyclopedia divided into 23 "chapters" (chromosome pairs), each gene "sentence" is composed of three-letter "words," which are in turn spelled by four molecular "letters" called nucleotides -- adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). By scanning a data base containing the complete sequence of letters, researchers could quickly end up at a particular gene's front door...
Someday, says Harvard molecular biologist Walter Gilbert, that diary -- the entire genetic record -- will fit on a single CD-ROM. "We look upon ourselves as having an infinite potential," he writes in The Code of Codes. "To recognize that we are determined, in a certain sense, by a finite collection of information that is knowable will change our view of ourselves. It is the closing of an intellectual frontier, with which we will have to come to terms...