Word: coding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...where we become who we are. James Watson and Francis Crick did not discover the existence of DNA; they discovered its structure, which means they unveiled its power as well as its beauty. If you could uncoil a strip of DNA, it would reach 6 ft. in length, a code book written in words of four chemical letters: A, T, G and C. Fold it back up, and it shrinks to trillionths of an inch, small enough to fit in any one of our 100 trillion cells, carrying the recipe for how to make a human being from scratch...
...good thing that we may have a long time to weigh the answers. The more scientists learn about the way we age, the more they wonder why we have to. Our skin replaces itself every two weeks, our bones every seven years or so. With the help of the code book, maybe scientists will one day turn our bodies into repair shops, learn how to control the genes that break and those that fix, so that our lives, like the immortal molecule Watson and Crick deconstructed 50 years...
...pieced together the correct solution to a problem that researchers around the world were racing to solve. They had built a model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that showed by its very structure how DNA could be everything they fiercely believed it to be: the carrier of the genetic code and thus the key molecule of heredity, developmental biology and evolution. Watson and Crick weren't necessarily the smartest scientists in the contest (though they were plenty smart). They weren't the most experienced; their track records in this area of science, in fact, were essentially nonexistent. They didn't have...
...year at the University of Chicago, Watson read a book titled What Is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics. Stepping boldly outside his field of expertise, Schrodinger argued that one of life's essential features is the storage and transmission of information--that is, a genetic code that passes from parent to child. And because it had to be both complex and compact enough to fit inside a single cell, this code had to be written at the molecular level...
Impressed by these arguments, Watson switched from birds to genetics and went to Indiana University in 1947 to study viruses, the simplest form of life on the planet and thus the one in which the code might be especially easy to find. By then, scientists had strong evidence that Schrodinger's genetic code was carried by DNA, thanks to a series of brilliant experiments on pneumococcal bacteria, first by Fred Griffith of the British Health Ministry and later by Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City...