Word: nucleic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Biology students used to be taught that there was a strict division of labor within living cells. The nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, served as repositories of genetic information, and certain proteins, called enzymes, did all the work. But research conducted in the past decade by Sidney Altman of Yale University and Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado at Boulder has forced scientists to alter completely their ideas not only of how cells function but also of how life on earth began. Last week the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to Altman and Cech, with the citation that "many...
...Harvard discussed the activity of small proteins that somehow attach themselves to the coils of DNA and control how the molecule replicates. Nobel Laureates David Baltimore of M.I.T. and Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin reported on the use of viruses, which are little more than coils of nucleic acid wrapped in protein, to transfer new DNA or its molecular cousin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), into bacterial cells. In the process, the cells are genetically transformed...
DIED. Sol Spiegelman, 68, pioneering microbiologist whose research on DNA and RNA, the nucleic acids that carry life's hereditary coding, helped lay the foundation for genetic engineering; in New York City. Spiegelman showed how RNA serves as a kind of blueprint whose coded genetic information orders up the production of substances, and also discovered key links between viruses and human cancer...
What proved most significant about Berg's experiment, and helped win the prize, were the steps that immediately preceded it. The virus he wanted to introduce into the bacterium was itself a hybrid. By ingenious use of enzymes that can cut, patch and join nucleic acids, he and his colleagues managed to splice DNA from a bacterial virus into SV40's genes, forming a single closed loop. That was the first time scientists had been able to link the genes of two distinctly different species, and thus created the prospect of producing entirely new life forms...
...area that was just breaking was genetic engineering or recombinant DNA. That year, at a session on nucleic acids, researchers first voiced what was to become a national concern over the technology's possible dangers in creating new life forms. Among the most pregnant research areas taken up at this year's Gordon conferences: the structure and function of "endogenous opiates," pain-killing chemicals produced by the body itself, and the new field of bioelectrochemistry that is beginning to draw attention with the recent discovery that electric currents sometimes help knit stubborn bone fractures...