Word: nucleic
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Bustamante had refined his techniques sufficiently by 1997 to grasp a single protein and, applying forces only a trillionth as strong as those the earth exerts on an apple, pull it apart like molecular Velcro. Why bother? To study how proteins and nucleic acids fold into their complex structures. That's a matter of considerable interest to drug designers, who tailor molecules to monkey-wrench the proteins that make us sick...
...members of the Cryonics Institute will painstakingly tend to your body until the as-yet-undetermined time when technological and medical advancements allow your consciousness to be restored. But how long, you ask? Basically until when we have figured out the human organism down to its enzymatic nuts and nucleic-acid bolts, and have developed microscopic wrench-wielding robots that can overhaul your ravaged body, rendering you operational once more. The price of this trip to the future can be financed through life insurance at a monthly cost of less than you would pay for basic cable (and since Harvard...
...COMPUTER One of the most ingenious ideas being pursued is to compute using DNA, treating the double-stranded molecule as a kind of biological computer tape (except that instead of encoding 0s and 1s in binary, it uses the four nucleic acids, represented by A, T, C, G). This approach holds much promise for crunching big numbers. Hence large banks and institutions may one day use it. However, a DNA computer is an unwieldy contraption, consisting of a jungle of tubes of organic liquid, and is unlikely to replace a laptop in the near future...
...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...