Word: nucleic
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...book Proteins and Nucleic Acids, Perutz compares protein molecules to animals, in the sense that both have a "three-dimensional anatomy laid out to a definite plan, rigid in some parts and flexible in others, with perhaps some minor variations in different individuals of the same species...
...structure of many viruses in their conventional forms is well known. They consist of a core of nucleic acid-either ribonucleic acid (RNA) or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-wrapped in a protein overcoat. It is in this form that they are most readily detectable. And also, it appears, most active: the naked nucleic acid alone (stripped of its overcoat by delicate chemical means) can produce most of the effects of the whole virus, but it is a thousand times less powerful. Evidently, the researchers suggest, the virus needs to be "carefully packaged for safe transmission." One effective package design is like...
...only a few have the dread power to manufacture the poison that leads to the formation of a dead ly, strangling membrane across the victim's throat. And this power depends on the microbes' being infected, in their turn, with a tiny particle of nucleic acid-the core of a virus, which has penetrated the bacterial cell. Why should not human cells become cancerous when a similar fragment of viral nucleic acid gets into their chromosomes and causes them to reproduce abnormally? By this reasoning, viruses have been called "bits of heredity in search of a chromosome...
Before such adventurous chemists as Gerhard Schramm even tried to manufacture nucleic acid, they had to understand how its giant molecules are put together, how they function as the essence of life on earth. Last week one American and two British scientists won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine for working out the complex structure of the most vital kind of nucleic acid, and for explaining how its structure enables it to control the heredity of all living creatures...
Until they won their joint award, just about the only thing the three researchers had in common was an interest in the molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the kind of nucleic acid that controls the reproduction of most living cells. California's famed chemist, Nobelman Linus Pauling, had suggested that this monster molecule, containing hundreds of thousands, or even millions of atoms, might be built in a spiral. Crick, Watson and Wilkins were among the many scientists who eagerly tested Pauling's theory...