Word: molecular
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Meanwhile, clinical and molecular researchers are launching a biological attack on the virus. Their objective: the development of vaccines to prevent its spread and drugs to treat those already infected. But the AIDS virus is a formidable adversary. Because it can reproduce so rapidly, says Harvard's Haseltine, it can mutate frequently, changing its outer coat (the essential ingredient in making a vaccine) 100 to 1,000 times as fast as quick-changing flu viruses. As a result, he says, "trying to develop a vaccine for AIDS is like trying to hit a rapidly moving target." Scientists are now searching...
McGee's description of the differences between the muscle fibers of fish and those of meat makes it clear why seafood is naturally tender whereas meat needs cooking to become easily chewable. Detailed diagrams of molecular structures and cross sections of tissues are always related to cooking and eating properties. A reader with a less scientific turn of mind can skip the theory and get almost as much from the applied information. Never mind the cell structure of beef: anyone attempting to broil a very thick cut will find that the surface is burned long before the interior...
...into a complex organism like a mouse or a human being. Someday the new technology could yield treatments for diseases such as cancer, thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia. In short, an increasing number of biologists and geneticists agree, the field of transgenic mice is hot. Says Rudolf Jaenisch, a molecular biologist with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.: "Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon because it's such an interesting wagon to ride...
...understand better the genetic basis of cancer, Philip Leder, a molecular geneticist at the Harvard Medical School and his colleague Timothy Stewart, have bred a line of transgenic mice that may someday serve as a model for human breast malignancy. He designed a DNA hybrid consisting of a gene called c-myc, which has been implicated in animal and human cancer, linked to a regulatory segment of another gene that is expressed in developing and lactating breast tissue. Soon after female mice with the injected gene give birth and begin nursing, they grow sizable tumors in their breasts. Perhaps more...
...most dramatic use of the technology is in the design of new chemicals and drugs. By showing how the molecules of the active ingredients in a drug attach themselves, like keys in locks, to target molecules in the body, computer models can help researchers see how a change in molecular structure will affect a drug's behavior. Says Robert Langridge, who heads the computer-graphics laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco: "I call it computer-assisted insight...