Word: schramme
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...chemists synthesize life? Not quite yet. But famed Biochemist Gerhard Schramm of the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research at Tubingen, Germany, is coming remarkably close. Last month he told a conference at Munich that he has managed with simple chemicals to build nucleic acid, the most vital compound in living organisms-and he used the same processes that are thought to have created the first life on earth...
...Schramm started his synthesis with chemicals that were probably dissolved in the ancient ocean before life appeared. Some of them were simple sugars, amino acids or nucleotides (small molecules contained in nucleic acids). Perhaps the most important were phosphorus compounds called polyphosphate esters. Dr. Schramm believes that all of them could have been formed by natural, nonliving reactions on the lifeless earth...
Last year Frau Ehrengard Schramm, a German historian, arrived in Greece to write a war history. She wanted to visit Kalavryta, but was warned not to; she went anyway. She met hostility but no harm. "They were simple in their sorrow," she said, "not fanatical. They had no self-pity, but their faces expressed so much sorrow my breath stopped." She talked with one woman whose husband and three sons had been killed. "Her figure," she said, "seemed to have turned to stone...
...Frau Schramm returned to Germany determined to arouse German women to the plight of Kalavryta, and to raise funds to buy machinery for some simple industry. "This is a matter for women," she said. "We must not let it get into the hands of men, who would spoil...
...spite of Frau Schramm-or perhaps because of her-the men of the West German government began to take an interest in Kalavryta. The German who, with his wife beside him, met with the village leaders was Alexander Post, commercial counselor of the German embassy in Athens. Under the reproachful eyes of the black-draped widows, he asked about what might be done as a measure of atonement: some looms, perhaps, to establish a small tapestry-weaving business, with equipment, dyes and technical assistance to come from Germany; 10,000 poplar trees to provide wood for the crates Greece needs...