Word: schramm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1962-1962
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chemists synthesize life? Not quite yet. But famed Biochemist Gerhard Schramm of the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research at Tubingen, Germany, is coming remarkably close. Last month he told a conference at Munich that he has managed with simple chemicals to build nucleic acid, the most vital compound in living organisms-and he used the same processes that are thought to have created the first life on earth...
Before such adventurous chemists as Gerhard Schramm even tried to manufacture nucleic acid, they had to understand how its giant molecules are put together, how they function as the essence of life on earth. Last week one American and two British scientists won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine for working out the complex structure of the most vital kind of nucleic acid, and for explaining how its structure enables it to control the heredity of all living creatures...
...Schramm started his synthesis with chemicals that were probably dissolved in the ancient ocean before life appeared. Some of them were simple sugars, amino acids or nucleotides (small molecules contained in nucleic acids). Perhaps the most important were phosphorus compounds called polyphosphate esters. Dr. Schramm believes that all of them could have been formed by natural, nonliving reactions on the lifeless earth...
...Schramm wants no one to assume-as some German newspapers have done-that he expects soon to create real living creatures in his laboratory. His synthetic nucleic acid is not alive; it is merely chemically similar to the giant molecules that cluster in the nuclei of living cells and enable them to reproduce their kind. But he has brought chemistry closer to the day when some resourceful researcher will put together a molecule that can lead a dim, synthetic life...