Word: molecular
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...enlightenment of the 1950s, the subject was closed. Even the magical initials DNA were scarcely known outside the scientific priesthood. But while the public remained ignorant of the intellectual time bomb silently ticking in its midst, a few young renegades created a startlingly new discipline that they called molecular biology...
...molecular biology's leap into prominence has been amply documented. In 1953, at Britain's venerable Cambridge University, two brash young scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick made a discovery comparable to the fissioning of the atom or Darwin's publication of Origin of Species. In a matter of months, after cribbing clues from associates and competitors, Watson, then 25, and Crick, 36, cracked what they grandiosely called "the secret of life": they unraveled the long, spiraling architecture of the DNA molecule, a feat that suggested how heredity truly worked...
...told the story better than Watson himself. His bestselling 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, was so witty and candid that Crick regarded it as an invasion of privacy. Why another traverse of the same terrain? Because, as Author Horace Freeland Judson makes clear in his extraordinary lay history of molecular biology, there is far more to DNA than Watson and Crick. Indeed, molecular biology's beginnings involved so many characters and subplots, so many false starts and flashes of insight, that it has all the elements of an epic detective story...
...former cultural correspondent for TIME in London, Judson spent nearly a decade immersing himself in molecular biology's opaque literature, learning its special language and nuances and, above all, interviewing its major figures. As he describes his visits with scientists in the lab, listening to their rambling explanations and even lunching with them at their homes, he seems to record every murmur and move, even the labels of the wines on their tables...
...academy also awarded Ptashne the annual U.S. Steel Foundation award in molecular biology...