Word: merrifield
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There is such a thing as an instant garden, more's the pity, but one pays a price for it. "Within the past three years or so," observes Larry Shapira, a horticulturist and consultant at Merrifield Garden Center outside Washington, "people have started coming in who just don't want to wait for smaller plants to become big ones. They want to go to the garden center in the morning, pick up the plant, drive the thing home, plant it, and have a drink under it that evening...
Like Henry Ford, Merrifield gained fame by automating a complex process. Proteins, produced inside living cells, are made of long chains of chemically linked amino acids, which group into units known as peptides. To understand a wide variety of biological processes, scientists must be able to trace the sequence of amino acids in a protein. They must know how to duplicate that sequence to manipulate its components for research. Before Merrifield developed his technique, biologists labored through dozens of painstaking purification procedures, taking months or even years to synthesize a peptide chain...
...Merrifield confined his simple process to a single laboratory container. Placing a microscopic polystyrene bead inside the receptacle to act as a solid, inert foundation, he began adding drops of amino acid units, which linked together in the proper order. He washed the growing chain in a purifying solution after adding each chemical, thus avoiding the possible need to remove any part for additional purification, as in past methods. When the protein was complete, acid was used to cleave it from the bead. Though Merrifield's first device, regulated by a metal cylinder studded with pegs, had a touch...
...Merrifield's primitive prototype has since been upgraded to computer-controlled models. The technique now synthesizes such complex peptides as ribonuclease, an enzyme needed by cells to decipher the genetic information in DNA. Pharmaceutical companies may soon exploit it to create new drugs, including vaccines and diabetic and heart medications...
...soft-spoken Texan, Merrifield is a graduate of UCLA and the 19th Nobelist to be associated with Rockefeller. He is the father of six children and for a while was the leader of a Boy Scout troop. When not at the lab, he spends his time happily tinkering around his house in Cresskill...