Hard as it is to imagine, there's a move afoot in Congress to take away the public's free online access to tax-funded medical research findings. That would be bad for medical discovery, bad for patients looking for the latest research results, and another rip-off of the American taxpayer.
I am a passionate reader, having been tutored very early by my mother. I avidly devoured all books on chemistry that I could find. Formal chemistry at school seemed boring by comparison, and my performance was routine. In contrast, I did spectacularly well in mathematics and sailed through classes and exams with ease.
During normal cell metabolism, RNA is constantly being made and broken down. The purine and pyrimidine residues are reused by several salvage pathways to make more genetic material. Purine is salvaged in the form of the corresponding nucleotide, whereas pyrimidine is salvaged as the nucleoside.
Each year, several million children either die or suffer irreparable developmental defects because of vitamin A deficiency. Countless others are harmed by malnutrition and starvation. Yet many of these deaths would be preventable if we addressed them head on and used the tools that exist to stop them.
A lot of medicines are not there to cure diseases. That's fine - drugs that keep people alive who wouldn't otherwise be alive are useful. What I object to is the drug companies' advertising, which you see everywhere in the U.S., which claims that they are curing diseases when they're not.
PubMed Central is vital for researchers and the public alike. Only through free access can everyone find out where the cutting edge of research lies. With access to the latest studies, patients and their families have a much-needed piece of the puzzle as they consider treatment options and potential outcomes.
Modern genetic engineering makes producing GMO food products relatively easy. GMOs can improve crop yield and greatly enhance the nutritional value of those same crops.
The strands of the DNA double helix are held together by hydrogen bonding interactions between the complementary base pairs. Heating DNA in solution easily breaks these hydrogen bonds, allowing the two strands to separate - a process called denaturation or melting.
My father was a motor mechanic, and my mother a homemaker. We moved to Bath when I was four, and so I consider myself a Bathonian.
DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.
Nucleic acids are the main information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by directing the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).
I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger's laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.
I have been intimately involved in the techniques of genetic modification as a scientist since GMOs were first conceived. In that time, hundreds of studies and tests have been done on GMO safety - and we've seen no scientific evidence that GMOs are inherently more dangerous than crops produced by traditional plant breeding.
The battle over genetically modified crops is rife with business interests and political opportunism. When GMOs were first produced in laboratories around the world, they were rightly heralded as a tremendous leap forward in our ability to supplement nature by providing high-nutrient foods.
From age 16 on, I found school boring and failed A-level Physics at my first attempt. This was necessary for university entrance, and so I stayed an extra year to repeat it. This time, I did splendidly and was admitted to Sheffield University, my first choice because of their excellent Chemistry Department.
