Word: molecular
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...after years of agonizingly slow progress in cancer research, there is a growing and barely suppressed sense of excitement among medical specialists. Just as a fortuitous confluence of developments in rocket, electronic and computer technology resulted in the space feats of the 1960s and 1970s, recent achievements in chemistry, molecular biology and genetic engineering are contributing to what could be, in several years, a major advance in cancer therapy. If all goes well, they will make possible ample supplies of what is now a rare, extremely expensive, but promising new cancer drug: interferon, or, as scientists abbreviate...
Other researchers are concentrating on unraveling IF's molecular structure. Caltech scientists are working with a "sequencing" machine that needs as little as ten picomoles (less than a millionth of a gram) of pure IF to determine the composition and sequence of the IF molecule's amino acid chain, which consists of about 150 links. Explains Molecular Geneticist Leroy Hood: "It's like having pearls of different colors on a string and clipping them off one by one and identifying the color of each...
...produce something new. It begins cranking out the protein and, given the proper nourishment, making millions of carbon copies of itself, each capable of producing the same protein. Though each creates only a tiny amount, the cumulative output can be substantial. Biogen's accomplishment, brought off by Swiss Molecular Biologist Charles Weissmann and his international team of colleagues, was to re-engineer E. coli so that it would produce largely complete molecules of human leukocyte IF. At Harvard, Biochemist Tadatsugu Taniguchi, who first isolated an interferon gene while at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, and Molecular Biologist Mark Ptashne...
Walsh holds professorships in both chemistry and biology at MIT and received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry in 1978 for his work on enzyme mechanisms. His research interests include molecular pharmacology and medicinal chemistry...
...takes 65,000 pints of blood to get just 100 mg (.0035 oz.) of the protein, so testing of the possible miracle drug has been severely limited. Now, as a result of another application of gene-splicing, or recombinant DNA, techniques, all that may change. In Boston last week molecular biologists announced that they had induced tiny bacterial "factories" to copy human interferon...