Word: proteins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...opportunity to balance out your loss." Walters' crop mix is typical. He usually grows corn on a particular field for two years, then switches to soybeans for a year. Gone is the ritual slopping of hogs; Erv's animals are fed carefully calibrated mixtures of corn and protein automatically through ducts that connect his silos with the feeding troughs. Absent too are some of the more familiar animals, such as horses and chickens. They are no longer profitable. As son Dan pithily sums it up: "If it don't pay, we don't have...
...potential panacea is isoprinosine, a derivative of the chemical inosine found in muscle tissue. In 1958, Gordon began experimenting with inosine to lessen "absentmindedness" in aged rats and mice. The substance, which stimulates protein production by brain cells, worked. Gordon observed that the drug also prevented viral action by blocking the genetic information that viruses must carry into cells in order to reproduce themselves (TIME, April 19). Speculating that the drug's antiviral action might be a useful medical tool, Gordon began to search for a derivative that did not have inosine's unpleasant side effect, a prolonged...
...HYDÉN'S RAT experiments demonstrated, RNA itself does not store memories; instead, it may play an intermediary role, stimulating the brain to produce proteins that are perhaps the actual repositories of memory. In one experiment inspired by that theory, University of Michigan Biochemist Bernard Agranoff taught goldfish to swim over a barrier, then injected them with puromycin, an antibiotic that prevents protein synthesis. When the injection was given hours after learning, it had no effect, suggesting that memory proteins had already formed. Injected just before or just after training, the drug prevented learning...
Other experiments based on the RNA-protein theory may demonstrate actual chemical memory transfer. Among the most publicized are those of University of Michigan Psychologist James McConnell and Neurochemist Georges Ungar of the Baylor College of Medicine. McConnell works with planaria, or flatworms, conditioning them by electrical shock to contract when a light is flashed. He then grinds them up and feeds them to untrained worms. Once they have cannibalized their brothers, the worms learn to contract twice as fast as their predecessors. What may happen, McConnell theorizes, is that the first batch of worms form new RNA, which synthesizes...
...parallel unnatural aversion to the dark. Moreover, the more broth Ungar injects, the faster the mice seem to learn this fear. His theory: the memory message (that darkness should be avoided) is encoded by the rats' DNA-RNA mechanism into an amino-acid chain called a peptide, a small protein that Ungar managed to isolate and then synthesize. His name for it: scotophobin, from the Greek words for "darkness" and "fear...