Word: code
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...desire to help speed up human genetics that drove me in 1986 to become an early partisan of the Human Genome Project, whose ultimate objective was to sequence the roughly 3 billion DNA letters that comprise our genetic code. Though many young hot-shots argued that the time for the project had not yet arrived, those of us a generation older were seeing at too close hand our parents and spouses falling victim to diseases of genetic predisposition. And virtually all of us knew couples rearing children whose future was clouded by a bad throw of the genetic dice...
Hidden somewhere in the remaining 98,000 base pairs are instructions that govern how much protein gets churned out--an essential clue for developing eventual treatments for diabetics. But before the public project's data began going up on GenBank, finding the hidden code would have been a daunting task. "To isolate the DNA and do all the sequencing would have taken a highly trained Ph.D. a year or two," says Altshuler, "an ungodly, unacceptable amount of work...
Following his lead, HGS scientists are ignoring most of the genetic code and concentrating on the mRNA that puts the code into action. During the 1990s the company amassed a huge library of mRNA and used microarrays to see which of these molecular snippets was active in disease. Haseltine's scientists were able to isolate 10 proteins, made from strands of mRNA, that are active in the healing of intractable wounds. Of these, nine were discarded because they may promote cancer...
...NIGMS hopes to construct a lexicon of shapes--barrels, doughnuts, globular spheres, molecular zippers and so on--that when mixed and matched will spell the shape of any gene's product. About 1,000 of these structures--and the genes that code for them--have already been cataloged...
...next big objective--finding how the four letters of the DNA alphabet (A, T, G and C) spell out the linear sequences of amino acids in the synthesis of proteins, the main actors in the drama of cellular life. As it turns out, the essence of the genetic code and of the molecular machinery that reads it was solidly established by 1966, only 13 years after Francis Crick and I discovered the double helix...