Victor K. McElheny
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Victor K. McElheny
Victor King McElheny (born 6 September 1935) is an American science writer and journalist, who has covered a wide variety of topics, including the Apollo lunar landing program, molecular biology, astronomy, science in Antarctica, and environmental issues. From ages 14 to 17, he was a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was the president of his class for the academic year 1952–1953 and wrote for ''The Exonian''. As an undergraduate at Harvard University from 1954 to 1957, McElheny graduated with a bachelor's degree in Social Relations and wrote for ''The Harvard Crimson''. From 1957 to 1958, he was in the U.S. Army, first in the U.S. Army Reserve in Fort Jackson, S.C. and then at the U.S. Army Information School in Fort Slocum, N.Y. McElheny has contributed many articles on science to newspapers and magazines and has been a journalist employed by ''The Charlotte Observer'', ''Science'' magazine, ''The Boston Globe'', and ''The New York Times''. He has written for tele ...
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Phillips Exeter Academy
(not for oneself) la, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends Upon the Beginning) gr, Χάριτι Θεοῦ (By the Grace of God) , location = 20 Main Street , city = Exeter, New Hampshire , zipcode = 03833 , type = Independent school, Independent, Day school, day & boarding school, boarding , established = , founder = John Phillips (educator), John PhillipsElizabeth Phillips , ceeb = 300185 , grades = Ninth grade#United States, 9–Twelfth grade#United States, 12 , head = William K. Rawson , faculty = 217 , gender = Coeducational , enrollment = 1,096 total865 boarding214 day , class = 12 students , ratio = 5:1 , athletics = 22 Interscholastic sports62 Interscholastic teams , conference = NEPS ...
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George Wald
George Wald (November 18, 1906 – April 12, 1997) was an American scientist who studied pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit. In 1970, Wald predicted that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Research As a postdoctoral researcher, Wald discovered that vitamin A was a component of the retina. His further experiments showed that when the pigment rhodopsin was exposed to light, it yielded the protein opsin and a compound containing vitamin A. This suggested that vitamin A was essential in retinal function. In the 1950s, Wald and his colleagues used chemical methods to extract pigments from the retina. Then, using a spectrophotometer, they were able to measure the light absorbance of the pigments. Since the absorbance of light by retina pigments corresponds to the wavelengths that best activate pho ...
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Waldorf Astoria New York
The Waldorf Astoria New York is a luxury hotel and condominium residence in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The structure, at 301 Park Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, is a 47-story Art Deco landmark designed by architects Schultze and Weaver, which was completed in 1931. The building was the world's tallest hotel from 1931 until 1963 when it was surpassed by Moscow's Hotel Ukraina by . An icon of glamour and luxury, the Waldorf Astoria is one of the world's most prestigious and best-known hotels. Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts is a division of Hilton Hotels, and a portfolio of high-end properties around the world operates under the name, including in New York City. Both the exterior and the interior of the Waldorf Astoria are designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as official landmarks. The original Waldorf–Astoria was built in two stages along Fifth Avenue and opened in 1893; it was demolished in 1929 to make way for the constructi ...
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Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project. Planning started after the idea was picked up in 1984 by the US government, the project formally launched in 1990, and was declared essentially complete on April 14, 2003, but included only about 85% of the genome. Level "complete genome" was achieved in May 2021, with a remaining only 0.3% bases covered by potential issues. The final gapless assembly was finished in January 2022. Funding came from the United States government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as numerous other groups from around the world. A parallel project was conducted outside the government by the ...
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. It is one of two de jure county seats of Middlesex County, although the county's executive government was abolished in 1997. Situated directly north of Boston, across the Charles River, it was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, once also an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lesley University, and Hult International Business School are in Cambridge, as was Radcliffe College before it merged with Harvard. Kendall Square in Cambridge has been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet" owing to the high concentration of successful startups that have emerged in the vicinity ...
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Century Association
The Century Association is a private social, arts, and dining club in New York City, founded in 1847. Its clubhouse is located at 7 West 43rd Street near Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It is primarily a club for men and women with distinction in literature or the arts. The Century Association was founded by members of New York's Sketch Club; preceding clubs also included the National Academy of Design, the Bread and Cheese Club, and the Column. Traditionally a men's club, women first became active in club life in the early 1900s; the organization began admitting women as members in 1988. Named after the first 100 people proposed as members, the first meeting on January 13, 1847 created the club known as the Century; it was incorporated in 1857. It was first housed at 495 Broadway in Lower Manhattan; the club gradually moved uptown, leading to the club's construction of its current location in 1899. During the Civil War, it became headquarters to the U.S. Sanitary Commission ...
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The Double Helix
''The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA'' is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and published in 1968. It has earned both critical and public praise, along with continuing controversy about credit for the Nobel award and attitudes towards female scientists at the time of the discovery. Significance Watson is a U.S. molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. In 1998, the Modern Library placed ''The Double Helix'' at number 7 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. In 2012, ''The Double Helix'' was named as one of the 88 "Books That Shaped America" by the Library of Congress. Though an important book about an immensely important subject, it was and remains a controversial account. Though it was originally slated to be ...
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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is one of 68 institutions supported by the Cancer Centers Program of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and has been an NCI-designated Cancer Center since 1987. The Laboratory is one of a handful of institutions that played a central role in the development of molecular genetics and molecular biology. It has been home to eight scientists who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. CSHL is ranked among the leading basic research institutions in molecular biology and genetics with Thomson Reuters ranking it #1 in the world. CSHL was also ranked #1 in research output worldwide by ''Nature''. The Laboratory is led by Bruce Stillman, a biochemist and cancer researcher. Since its inception in 1890, the institution's campus on the North Shore of Long Island has also been ...
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Molecular Biology
Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physical structure of biological macromolecules is known as molecular biology. Molecular biology was first described as an approach focused on the underpinnings of biological phenomena - uncovering the structures of biological molecules as well as their interactions, and how these interactions explain observations of classical biology. In 1945 the term molecular biology was used by physicist William Astbury. In 1953 Francis Crick, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and colleagues, working at Medical Research Council unit, Cavendish laboratory, Cambridge (now the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology), made a double helix model of DNA which changed the entire research scenario. They proposed the DNA structure based on previous research done by Ro ...
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Mark Ptashne
Mark Ptashne (born June 5, 1940, in Chicago) is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1961 and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard. He was made professor there in 1971 and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1993 he was awarded an endowed chair, and in 1997 he left Harvard for MSK. The focus of his scientific career has been gene regulation. Ptashne was the first scientist to demonstrate specific binding between protein and DNA, and his lifelong work has been the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms of switch between lytic and lysogenic lifecyle of bacteriophage lambda, as well as how the yeast transcriptional activator Gal4 works. He was the originator of the "ball and stick" model of transcription fact ...
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Walter Gilbert
Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate. Education and early life Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, the son of Emma (Cohen), a child psychologist, and Richard V. Gilbert, an economist. When Gilbert was seven years old, the family moved to the Washington D.C. area so his father could work under Harry Hopkins on the New Deal brain trust. While living in Washington the family became friends with the family of I.F. Stone and Wally met Stone's oldest daughter, Celia, when they were both 8. They later married at age 21. He was educated at the Sidwell Friends School, and attended Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate studies, earning a baccalaureate in chemistry and physics in 1953 and a master's degree in physics in 1954. He studied for his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in physics supervised by the Nobel laureate Abdus ...
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Repressor
In molecular genetics, a repressor is a DNA- or RNA-binding protein that inhibits the expression of one or more genes by binding to the operator or associated silencers. A DNA-binding repressor blocks the attachment of RNA polymerase to the promoter, thus preventing transcription of the genes into messenger RNA. An RNA-binding repressor binds to the mRNA and prevents translation of the mRNA into protein. This blocking or reducing of expression is called repression. Function If an inducer, a molecule that initiates the gene expression, is present, then it can interact with the repressor protein and detach it from the operator. RNA polymerase then can transcribe the message (expressing the gene). A co-repressor is a molecule that can bind to the repressor and make it bind to the operator tightly, which decreases transcription. A repressor that binds with a co-repressor is termed an ''aporepressor'' or ''inactive repressor''. One type of aporepressor is the trp repressor, a ...
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