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23 Feb 2021 09:41 #389232
by ketchim
But these fastest vaccines in history have been decades in the making.
They’re the product of generations of scientists who built on one idea after another
and kept at it despite failed experiments, rejections, threats of deportation
a lack of funding and skepticism from contemporaries.
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23 Feb 2021 09:42 - 23 Feb 2021 09:45 #389233
by ketchim
They were inspired by the discovery of DNA:
in 1951, a young English physical chemist named Rosalind Franklin took X-ray photographs that captured
DNA’s helical shape; two years later, James Watson and Francis Crick of Cambridge University
published the first report describing DNA’s double helix for which they received the Nobel Prize.
(Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958; her contributions were largely overlooked in her lifetime.)
And they were driven not by a race to halt a raging pathogen
or by the chance to patent a multi-billion-dollar drug, but by one big, irresistible question:
What makes life?
Last edit: 23 Feb 2021 09:45 by
ketchim.
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23 Feb 2021 09:49 #389234
by ketchim
DNA resides in the nucleus, a compartment barricaded off from the rest of the cell by a membrane.
On the other side of the membrane is the cytoplasm, a gelatinous liquid that fills the remainder of the cell.
This is the home of tiny granules called ribosomes, which house RNA.
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23 Feb 2021 09:55 #389235
by ketchim
French scientists discovered that cells made proteins through the ribosomes.
DNA, despite holding the critical codes for life, is a relatively passive molecule.
Ribosomes do the busy labour, building proteins to carry out the biological processes of survival.
The question was how?
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23 Feb 2021 09:58 - 23 Feb 2021 09:58 #389236
by ketchim
One of the French scientists, Dr. François Jacob, theorized that there must be an “unstable intermediary”
that went between the DNA and the RNA
—sending messages from the DNA to the RNA, and then disappearing.
called this theoretical intermediary “X.”
Other researchers “rolled their eyes in horror” Jacob recalled in his memoir, The Statue Within.
Last edit: 23 Feb 2021 09:58 by
ketchim.
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23 Feb 2021 10:01 #389237
by ketchim
Jacob wrote in his memoir: “Suddenly, Sydney gives a hoot. He leaps up, yelling
‘The magnesium! It’s the magnesium!’
They raced back to the lab to run the experiment one last time, with additional magnesium.
The result was spectacular.
X existed.
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23 Feb 2021 10:01 - 23 Feb 2021 10:02 #389238
by ketchim
When the trio published their findings in 1961 :
they renamed X as messenger RNA.
Last edit: 23 Feb 2021 10:02 by
ketchim.
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mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago !
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