Word: nucleic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...computing power. It's time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now we're just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time: deciphering the human genome, the 100,000 genes encoded by 3 billion chemical pairs...
...anti-sense DNA, mistaking it as a potentially harmful virus. For another, many cells in the body don't allow the anti-sense molecules to cross their membranes. "Nine years ago, everyone thought, wow, this is dynamite," says Dr. Art Krieg, editor of the journal Anti-Sense and Nucleic Acid Drug Development. "Then they ran into technical hurdles, and the pendulum swung the other way." Now, says Krieg, a few anti-sense compounds are starting to show promise. Among them is a drug called Vitravene, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in August and is used...
...years following his work, biologists mapping human chromosomes looked for a gene that enforced cellular mortality, but found nothing. One thing that did catch their eyes, however, was a small area at the tip of chromosomes that had no discernible purpose. Dubbed a telomere, the sequence of nucleic acids did not appear to code for any traits. Instead it resembled nothing so much as the plastic cuff at the end of a shoelace that keeps the rest of the strand from unraveling...
...Getting your doctorate in two years was remarkable then, and unheard of today," Westheimer said. "[Breslow] subsequently went to Cambridge University to work with Alex Todd, one of the earliest researchers in nucleic acid chemistry...
...does this mean that a dinosaur assembly plant is on the way? Don't hold your breath. The sections of DNA that Woodward collected are much too short for any practical use. The full complement of genes needed to create an organism contains billions of nucleic acid pairs. Woodward found 174 pairs, too few to be certain what animal they came from. "The pieces are so short that you can't say they are like one thing or another," says Ward Wheeler, a molecular biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "It could be a turtle or a mammal...