Word: physicists
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...understood only on the molecular level. In their investigations, some used the electron microscope, which revealed details of structure invisible to ordinary optical instruments. Others specialized in X-ray crystallography, a technique for deducing a crystallized molecule's structure by taking X-ray photographs of it from different angles. Physicist Max Delbrück turned to nature for his investigative tools: bacteriophages (literally, "bacteria eaters"), tiny parasitic viruses that invade their host bacteria and rob them of their genetic heritage...
Inspired by these experiments, Watson, then a young Ph.D. in biology from Indiana University, decided to take a crack at the complex structure of DNA itself. The same thought struck Crick, a physicist turned biologist who was preparing for his doctorate at Cambridge. Neither man was particularly well equipped to undertake a task so formidable that it had stymied one of the world's most celebrated chemists, Linus Pauling. Watson, for his part, was deficient in chemistry, crystallography and mathematics. Crick, on the other hand, was almost totally ignorant of genetics. But together, in less than two years of work...
...this scheme still left unanswered one more question: How could DNA or RNA choose from among 20 amino acids to produce complex proteins by using an informational system that had only four code letters?the four bases?at its disposal? An answer to this intriguing problem was suggested by Physicist George Gamow, who likened the four bases to the different suits in a deck of playing cards...
...most laymen, the idea of remaking man's mind is unthinkable; "You can't change human nature," they insist. But many scientists are convinced that the mind can be altered because it is really matter. Explains Physicist Gerald Feinberg: "What sets us apart from inanimate matter is not that we are made of different stuff, or that different physical principles determine our workings. It is rather the greater complexity of our construction and the self-awareness that this makes possible...
...case, the black hole itself could never be observed. The only thing a dedicated scientist might do, muses Caltech Physicist Kip Thorne, long a black-hole theorist, would be to ride down the surface of a collapsing star and into a black hole. "Of course, he could never get back out, or communicate his results to the outside. But who is to deny a man the right to his own personal pursuit of knowledge...