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Posts Tagged DNA

Crick’s letter to son, aged 12, explaining DNA structure model Grant Jacobs Feb 27

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Yesterday I wrote about how the Crick family is to sell Francis Crick’s Nobel Prize medal. In that post I mentioned how my attention was drawn to that the family is also considering selling Crick’s letter to his son Michael, then aged 12, explaining his and James Waton’s model for the structure of DNA.

It struck me as I was curious to see how he’d write to a non-scientist at close to the time of creating their model.

I was unsure if this letter had already been published and I now see that The New York Times has posted a copy of the letter on-line as a part of an article about Crick writing to his son.

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Animating our DNA* Grant Jacobs Jan 20

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One part of biology that fascinates me is the three-dimensional structure of genomes and all that goes with them within the nucleus, the central organelle in our cells containing our genomes and the molecular machinery that organises, moves and processes our genetic information.

In the TED lecture below Drew Berry speaking in Sydney, Australia, shows off animations of molecular life.

The animations he shows are of DNA, chromosomes and the proteins that work with them.

Here, let me get out of the way so you can watch it -

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Arsenic life – more criticism, formally published Grant Jacobs May 29

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Science magazine has lined up eight Technical Comments on-line in advance-of-print release, along with a response to these from the authors, that will stand alongside ’the’ arsenic life paper to be published in in print next week’s edition after a wait of roughly six months. With the exception of the accompanying editorial, these are all open-access.

For those new to the story, the ‘lite’ gloss–i.e., for a non-scientist readership–of this research arguing that a bacteria uses arsenic in place of phosphate in it’s DNAgoes something like this.

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