Word: pieczenik
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...Darwin wrote that it was the individual organism. But Sociobiologists believe it is the genes themselves that conduct the life-or-death evolutionary struggle. This gene-based view of life is compatible with a finding made independently by researchers in a widely divergent branch of science. Rutgers Biochemist George Pieczenik has discovered patterns in DNA coding that he sees as evidence of selection occurring at the molecular level (TIME, April 4). "What this means," he says, "is that the DNA sequences exist to protect themselves and their own information. It's not the organism that counts. The DNA sequences...
...master molecule, DNA. His co-workers were Sydney Brenner, who discovered the "start" and "stop" signals in the genetic code; Aaron Klug, who first determined the crystalline structure of transfer RNA (tRNA), the molecule that brings amino acids to the ribosome for assembly into protein; and George Pieczenik, 32, a biochemist now at Rutgers University in New Brunswick...
...quartet based its work on the discovery by Pieczenik that there are certain constraints on the way that the nucleotides, or "letters," of the genetic message are arranged. These patterns could have arisen, they found, if primitive tRNA molecules each had five nucleotides interacting with the genetic message instead of the three that now do. With five nucleotides, tRNA molecules-each lugging along its distinctive amino acid-could link up firmly with a messenger RNA molecule (which brings the genetic instructions from the DNA molecule). The amino acids could thus be assembled into the appropriate protein without...
Updating Darwin. Pieczenik believes there is further significance in the DNA patterns he discovered. In his view, the constraints suggest that a process of natural selection occurs at the molecular level long before organisms develop. If this is true, some additions will have to be made to the Darwinian theory that natural selection takes place only after the organism is formed and begins adapting to the world around it. That notion does not seem to bother Pieczenik. "What this means," he says, "is that the DNA sequences exist to protect themselves and their own information...
...George Pieczenik '65 had maintained in a dining hall speech that civil rights and peace movement activists had recently been subjected to threats and other forms of harassment...
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