Word: molecular
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...acts as a sort of coded instruction manual -- tell different cells what their duties are within an organism. Armed with such specific knowledge, researchers may someday understand exactly why these instructions are occasionally garbled and, perhaps, why cancer and other gene-influenced diseases occur. Predicts Stephen Howell, a plant molecular biologist and a member of the research team: "The scientific community will be able to exploit this tool for as many purposes as one can imagine...
...their malevolence and mischief, viruses may have played an important, perhaps crucial, role in evolution. And now, as recombinant DNA technology advances, molecular biologists are engineering viruses that may ! soon benefit rather than devastate humans...
...invention of the electron microscope -- for which German Physicist Ernst Ruska finally won the Nobel Prize this year -- broke the light barrier. The new instrument -- along with a technique called X-ray crystallography (in which X rays are diffracted through crystallized virus particles to reveal their molecular structure) -- at last provided a view of the bizarre and startling world of the tiny creatures...
...late 1950s Herschbach proposed to study what happens to individual molecules in the trillionth of a second of a chemical reaction by using the crossed molecular beam technique. Colleagues thought he was crazy, but this novel approach proved to be useful -- especially in the following years, when Lee made improvements that substantially increased the variety of reactions that could be studied this way. The method is analogous to that of particle physicists, who accelerate beams of speeding subatomic particles, smash them together or into a target, and then study the resulting debris. Herschbach's and Lee's beams consist...
LAST WEEK THE Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Baird Professor of Science Dudley R. Herschbach with the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in molecular motion. At Harvard, however, Herschbach deserves another kind of recognition--for his commitment to undergraduate teaching and community life...