Word: nucleic
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This year, the MBC expanded its annual meeting at the World Trade Center to a two-day conference of biotechnology business seminars, a science symposium focusing on drug design and nucleic acid-based therapy and a trade exposition by over 150 companies featuring the latest in biotechnology and related products...
...formidable enough opponent, mainly because researchers still don't understand the method to its madness. Like all viruses, HIV is simply a strand of genetic material (in this case the nucleic acid RNA) surrounded by a protein coat. A virus lacks the tools to reproduce unless it invades a living cell and takes over the host's molecular machinery. The intruder can then produce many copies of itself, eventually killing the cell. One of HIV's favorite targets is the CD4 T-cell, an important player in the human immune system...
...these things alive? That depends on how the term is defined. Surprisingly, there is no clear definition of "life." Most of the criteria put forward in the past are anthropocentric. Life on earth is carbon-based and built around the nucleic acids RNA and DNA, but that may be a historical accident. Most living things metabolize and multiply, but not all. Viruses have no metabolisms of their own; mules cannot reproduce. Many living things grow, but so do clouds and garbage dumps...
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...