Word: rna
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...inferiority, but we're talking about the important factor of melanin." Blacks have more melanin -- a skin pigment -- than whites; Jeffries asserts, "It allows us to negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun." He draws a smaller triangle with "RNA" and "DNA" at the corners and "melanin" on top. Another paradigm...
...class breaks up, students gather around the professor and ask questions. Most are interested in how many papers they will have to write. A reporter asks for a clarification of the DNA-RNA-melanin triangle. "Well, for one thing," Jeffries replies, "you want to have the duality-polarity in life." Two or three students glance about nervously. "There's a mix," he says, and adds, his voice getting softer, "a mix of DNA, RNA, and there's a not-too- understood question of melanin, the organized molecule, in the beginning. And this is the relationship that produces the processes...
...This prejudice stayed with him through his undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, where he excelled in the hard sciences and avoided biology as if it were basket weaving. But as a Yale Ph.D. candidate in physical chemistry, he took biochemistry, encountering for the first time DNA and RNA, the molecules that carry the code of life. "I was," he says, "completely blown away...
...these efforts is getting the right genes into the cells that need them. Generally, the genes must be carried by some sort of delivery vehicle, which scientists call a vector. For its vector, Anderson's team used an infectious agent known as a retrovirus -- a specialized virus containing RNA (a single-strand cousin of DNA) that has a knack for finding its way to a cell's genome and making itself at home. Retroviruses can be dangerous (HIV is the most notorious), but scientists have ways of altering them so that they don't cause disease. Still, the small risk...
Participants in yesterday's science seminar discussed the use of DNA and RNA both as diagnostic tools and as drug therapy in the future...