Word: nucleic
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...December cover of Scientific American is a four-color portrait of a camel wearing a nose cone and placidly taking a metabolism test. The table of contents scarcely suggests light reading: "Nucleic Acids and Proteins," "Differentiation in Social Amoebae," "The Proto-Castles of Sardinia." Even the department of games beginning on page 166 is strictly for mathematicians: three computer programers named Ames, Baker and Coombs set out to decide who pays for the beer, but instead of flipping a coin they apply algebraic group theory. (Baker pays...
...Louis' Washington University, he joined Manhattan's New York University, intensified his research on enzymes, the catalysts of life. In 1946 he had a brilliant post-doctoral student, Arthur Kornberg. Within ten years Dr. Ochoa and colleagues found a way to make an enzyme build up nucleic acids and, in effect, create a synthetic form of RNA. Brooklyn-born Dr. Arthur Kornberg, 41, graduated from the City College of New York at 19. Working for his M.D. at the University of Rochester, he picked up hepatitis, put the experience to good use by publishing his first paper...
...this fast detection method was reported to a meeting of the International Academy of Pathology in Boston. Developed at Washington's Walter Reed Army Hospital, by Captain Leroy H. Dart Jr. and Master Sergeant Thomas R. Turner, the new wrinkle rests on facts about the cell's nucleic acids that were unknown in 1943. Biochemists are now sure that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) generally increases in human cancer cells; they suspect that ribonucleic acid (RNA) also rises. If the nucleic acid can be spotted under a microscope, it should be a tipoff to cancer...
...detect DNA and RNA, the Army team used acridine orange, a fluorochrome dye that easily unites with the nucleic acids and shines brightly under ultraviolet light. Result: the higher the cell's nucleic acid content, the more intense the fluorescence (green to yellow for DNA, red for RNA). After a few hours of training, a skilled cyto-technologist can spot malignant cells by the intensity of fluorescence he sees in his microscope...
...lacy pattern of little round balls in the background of this week's cover is from a deoxyribo-nucleic-acid molecule model built at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute. The grey balls represent carbon atoms; blue is phosphorous; yellow is nitrogen; red is oxygen; white is hydrogen. Molecules do not look like this, of course. The atoms in them are much too small to be seen, even with an electron microscope. The pattern shown is a small part, somewhat simplified, of the DNA molecule, which geneticists now believe is the carrier of heredity and the chemical master...