Word: nucleic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...replication and protein synthesis. More recent discoveries in the field have clearly illuminated the basic biochemical manner in which genetic materials are replicated and translated inside living tissue. Chance and Necessity reviews this information, describing the molecular structures in a fairly non-technical fashion. Monod hypothesizes how the nucleic acids might have originated as the information carrier molecule, suggests that the genetic code may have come into being purely randomly, and even suggests a mechanism for DNA-protein specificity of translation that may have originated without an RNA intermediate...
Having dispatched with the nucleic acids, showing how they could originate and function by random events. Monod moves to the question of cellular proteins. The processes of life within a cell--metabolism--are carried out primarily by proteins: enzymatic proteins, regulatory proteins, structural proteins. Monod carefully constructs for the reader the essence of enzyme functions and mechanisms as they are presently known and builds from this a model for complex, intricate interactions (as they must be inside the cell) which originated and shaped themselves by chance...
Monod also points out that, knowing what we do about nucleic acids, it is easy to explain the transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next. Thus there is a biochemical necessity for a specific function to take place in the organism and in his descendants once this function has been coded (randomly, it seems) in the paternal...
Most researchers have long believed that viruses play some crucial role in causing human cancers. The source and precise function of these viruses (tiny packets of nucleic acids and protein) in cancer are still obscure, and no one knows how to control them. Dramatic progress cannot be made until cancer viruses are clearly identified in humans, as has already been done in animals. Now that vital next step has apparently been taken...
...diagram "Protein Synthesis," your artist showed the nucleic-acid fragment UGA as a "three-letter word" that "codes for one amino acid...