Word: tip
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...were a nematode in Siegfried Hekimi's genetics lab, you would be one of the most remarkable creatures in the world. It wouldn't be your looks that made you special, of course. As a tiny transparent worm measuring a millimeter from tip to tail, you would be nearly invisible to the naked eye. Nor would it be the way you spent your time. Moving little and eating less, you would pass all your days inside a Petri dish, resting atop a bed of nutrient...
...clues are tantalizing. In some research centers, investigators are studying an area at the tip of chromosomes that appears to shorten, fuselike, as we grow older. Extinguish the chemical fire that consumes the fuse, and you might be able to bring aging to a halt. Elsewhere, scientists are studying how the waste produced when a cell consumes food can contaminate its innards, a process that can lead to the body-wide breakdowns we associate with aging. Clean up the cells, and you should be able to buck up the entire organism. Still elsewhere, geneticists are beginning to map the very...
...cell replication in the lab, Hayflick left a question unanswered: why the cells die. In the years following his work, biologists mapping human chromosomes looked for a gene that enforced cellular mortality, but found nothing. One thing that did catch their eyes, however, was a small area at the tip of chromosomes that had no discernible purpose. Dubbed a telomere, the sequence of nucleic acids did not appear to code for any traits. Instead it resembled nothing so much as the plastic cuff at the end of a shoelace that keeps the rest of the strand from unraveling...
...that sentiment that did the most to save the G.O.P. from what otherwise might have been a congressional loss as humiliating as Dole's trouncing by Clinton. To an extraordinary extent, both parties fought the campaigns for House seats as a referendum on national policy; former House Speaker Tip O'Neill's maxim that "all politics is local" has rarely been so widely flouted. Democrats pleaded with voters to repudiate the so-called revolution of O'Neill's successor twice removed, Newt Gingrich, whom they pictured as avid to gut all programs of government help to the poor and middle...
...Frankenstein jacket and flopping trousers that gather at the ankles. Clinton's head, handsome from certain angles, took on a big-jawed Joe Palooka look if he turned slightly to the side; and then with knobby chin and brightening nose, he could seem a cross between W.C. Fields and Tip O'Neill--distinctly subcharismatic...