Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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So many fields of science made such great progress that each could produce its own contender for Person of the Century.
Let's start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth...
Fleming serves well as a symbol of all the great medical researchers, such as Jonas Salk and David Ho, who fought disease. But he personally did little, after his initial eureka! moment, to develop penicillin. Nor has the fight against infectious diseases been so successful that it will stand as...
The century's greater biological breakthrough was more basic. It was unceremoniously announced on Feb. 28, 1953, when Francis Crick winged into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and declared that he and his partner James Watson had "found the secret of life."
Watson had sketched out how four chemical bases paired to create a self-copying code at the core of the double-helix-shaped DNA molecule. In the more formal announcement of their discovery, a one-page paper in the journal Nature, they noted the significance in a famously understated sentence...