Word: originator
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...have depended solely on DNA, the principal carrier of hereditary information in plants, animals and bacteria. "Now that we know that RNA can both carry genetic information and serve as a catalyst," Cech wrote last year, "it seems possible that it was the key molecule at the origin of life...
There is considerable mystery about how the ivory gets from Africa to the Far East. Over the past decade, as much as four-fifths of that ivory has been of illegal origin -- poached, then smuggled. Sometimes the poachers cross borders to hunt, as from Somalia into Kenya or Zambia into Zimbabwe, then carry the tusks back by night. Some poachers are tribal villagers, illiterate and poor, who stalk their prey on foot, walking for weeks, living off game. A poacher in Kenya says he believes tribal charms make him invisible to antipoaching units. He buries his tusks in the village...
...years, ivory of questionable origin flowed into Hong Kong. Until mid- 1988, the importation of carved ivory was largely unregulated, and so tusks lacking documentation were diverted through the Middle East and elsewhere, where they were lightly carved so they could enter Hong Kong as legal ivory. Last June, as nations moved to ban ivory imports, Hong Kong set up a special customs task force aimed at smugglers, as well as a 24-hour hot line. It has closed its borders to ivory imports for the time being...
...Ugandan documents. The papers were false. Kitagawa says he believed the documents were valid and trusted the ivory's seller, whose name he no longer remembers. There is no evidence that Kitagawa violated any laws, but the rules allowed him to purchase ivory that had been confiscated or whose origins in Africa were lost in the myriad transactions between that continent and Japan. Under "country of origin," some of the export permits say only "unknown" or are blank. Kitagawa bought 13 tons in Singapore last year and twelve tons from Burundi...
...year. Visiting warehouses where tusks were stacked to the ceiling, "I got to see the ivory the way the Far East sees ivory -- divorced from the animal and remote from the killing," Gup says. "Most of the consumers are so far from the source that they cannot imagine its origin in axes and blood. As I went back toward Africa, the horror...