The Double Helix Quotes

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. . . .

[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods] Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

Will we turn our backs on science because it is perceived as a threat to God, abandoning all the promise of advancing our understanding of nature and applying that to the alleviation of suffering and the betterment of humankind? Alternatively, will we turn our backs on faith, concluding that science has rendered the spiritual life no longer necessary, and that traditional religious symbols can now be replaced by engravings of the double helix on our alters? Both of these choices are profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful - and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.

Is this all we are? A necklace of chemicals? Where, in the double helix, does the soul lie?

Why do you like show jumping?" "... Beauty and excitement. The elements of trust, talent, training, love, and danger make show jumping a thrilling and aesthetic experience. It's really the ultimate test of two nervous systems--the kinetic transfer of the rider's muscle to the horse's muscle enables them to clear those jumps. And there's nothing like it--horse and rider forming an arc of beauty, efficiency, and power, like a double helix." "DNA," "Yes, DNA, the code to life.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that , in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

In the end, though, science is what matters; scientists not a bit.

Nancy According to astronomers, every atom in my body was forged in a star. I am made, they insist, of stardust. I am stardust braided into strands and streamers of information, proteins and DNA, double helixes of stardust. In every cell of my body there is a thread of stardust as long as my arm.

Worrying about complications before ruling out the possibility that the answer was simple would have been damned foolishness.

​Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion.

Look in it,' he said, smiling slightly, as you do when you have given someone a present which you know will please him and he is unwrapping it before your eyes. I opened it. In the folder I found four 8×10 glossy photos, obviously professionally done; they looked like the kind of stills that the publicity departments of movie studios put out. The photos showed a Greek vase, on it a painting of a male figure who we recognized as Hermes. Twined around the vase the double helix confronted us, done in red glaze against a black background. The DNA molecule. There could be no mistake. 'Twenty-three or -four hundred years ago,' Fat said. 'Not the picture but the krater, the pottery.' 'A pot,' I said. 'I saw it in a museum in Athens. It's authentic. Thats not a matter of my own opinion; I'm not qualified to judge such matters; it's authenticity has been established by the museum authorities. I talked with one of them. He hadn't realized what the design shows; he was very interested when I discussed it with him. This form of vase, the krater, was the shape later used as the baptismal font. That was one of the Greek words that came into my head in March 1974, the word “krater”. I heard it connected with another Greek word: “poros”. The words “poros krater” essentially mean “limestone font”. ' There could be no doubt; the design, predating Christianity, was Crick and Watson's double helix model at which they had arrived after so many wrong guesses, so much trial-and-error work. Here it was, faithfully reproduced. 'Well?' I said. 'The so-called intertwined snakes of the caduceus. Originally the caduceus, which is still the symbol of medicine was the staff of- not Hermes-but-' Fat paused, his eyes bright. 'Of Asklepios. It has a very specific meaning, besides that of wisdom, which the snakes allude to; it shows that the bearer is a sacred person and not to be molested...which is why Hermes the messenger of the gods, carried it.' None of us said anything for a time. Kevin started to utter something sarcastic, something in his dry, witty way, but he did not; he only sat without speaking. Examining the 8×10 glossies, Ginger said, 'How lovely!' 'The greatest physician in all human history,' Fat said to her. 'Asklepios, the founder of Greek medicine. The Roman Emperor Julian-known to us as Julian the Apostate because he renounced Christianity-conside​red Asklepios as God or a god; Julian worshipped him. If that worship had continued, the entire history of the Western world would have basically changed

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome: the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions: improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

The double-helix has solved all three of the major challenges of genetic physiology using ingenious variations on the same theme. Mirror-image chemicals are used to generate mirror-image chemicals, reflections used to reconstruct the orginal. Pairs used to maintain the fidelity and fixity of information. "Monet is but an eye," Cezanne once said of his friend, "but, God, what an eye." DNA, by the same logic, is but a chemical-but, God, what a chemical.

You are comprised of 84 minerals, 23 elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells. You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by a sperm. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet's most complex living thing. You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.

On the other hand, the sun of Naples might be conducive to learning something about the biochemistry of the embryonic development of marine animals.

The two of them were forever tied to each other, twisting and turning both in unison and in opposition. A double helix. Each necessary to the other's survival.

The two of them were forever tied to each other, twisting and turning both in unison and in opposition. A double helix. Each necessary to the other’s survival.

She is wearing a double helix made of gold. The twisted ladder of life. A strand of DNA.

The spirit of a good woman cannot be coded by nucleic acids arranged in a double helix, and only an overeducated fool could think so.

Whenever I look at you, I’m reminded of how beautiful my creations are,

It is remarkable, the lines that connect people. You can strike up a conversation with someone, a stranger even, and discover that you have a friend in common, that your aunts were from the same town, or that his best friend can grease your way into Bhutan. It seems on those occasions that we are all like strands of DNA, spun around each other in a double helix.

Surprisingly, palindromes appear not just in witty word games but also in the structure of the male-defining Y chromosome. The Y's full genome sequencing was completed only in 2003. This was the crowning achievement of a heroic effort, and it revealed that the powers of preservation of this sex chromosome have been grossly underestimated. Other human chromosome pairs fight damaging mutations by swapping genes. Because the Y lacks a partner, genome biologists had previously estimated that its cargo was about to dwindle away in perhaps as little as five million years. To their amazement, however, the researchers on the sequencing team discovered that the chromosome fights withering with palindromes. About six million of its fifty million DNA letters form palindromic sequences-sequences that read the same forward and backward on the two strands of the double helix. These copies not only provide backups in case of bad mutations, but also allow the chromosome, to some extent, to have sex with itself-arms can swap position and genes are shuffled. As team leader David Page of MIT has put it, "The Y chromosome is a hall of mirrors.

Shall we do something we’ve never done? Shall we prick and twist and play the braid until it yields us a place downthread, bend the fork of our Shifts into a double helix around our base pair?

So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn’t touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder—the famed double helix.

Bohm believes the same is true at our own level of existence. Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface, a comparatively small "pattern of excitation" in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean. "This excitation pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to approximately recurrent, stable and separable projections into a three-dimensional explicate order of manifestation, " states Bohm.1 2 In other words, despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable. More than that, it is not even a major production of this vaster something, but is only a passing shadow, a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things. This infinite sea of energy is not all that is enfolded in the implicate order. Because the implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it also contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be; every configuration of matter, energy, life, and consciousness that is possible, from quasars to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double helix, to the forces that control the sizes and shapes of galaxies. And even this is not all it may contain. Bohm concedes that there is no reason to believe the implicate order is the end of things. There may be other undreamed of orders beyond it, infinite stages of further development.

a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells’ nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place—and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is—the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That’s it? That’s it.

Of all the things we could have said to the people of other planets, we chose to fire into space a capsule containing the model for the double helix structure, the composition of DNA and the formation of nucleotides. Not a message that declared: it is sunny here it also rains a lot we love colours and dope we sign and we dance we cook up a storm with anything we can find we are fucked up in too many ways but we are a funny bunch so may we request the pleasure of your company

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

How many genetic engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Eleven—one to do the work, and the other ten to figure out why it doesn’t have a double helix.” “What’s the definition of a virgin genetic engineer? A nerd with too many pocket protectors.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

DNA is the basis for all life on Earth. It has a double-helix structure, like a spiral staircase, which was discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson in the Cavendish lab at Cambridge in 1953. The two strands of the double helix are linked by pairs of nitrogenous bases like the treads in a spiral staircase. There are four kinds of nitrogenous bases: cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine. The order in which the different nitrogenous bases occur along the spiral staircase carries the genetic information that enables the DNA molecule to assemble an organism around it and reproduce itself.

By studying ancient symbols, Bruce had discovered that genetic tampering was commonplace throughout the ages, indicated by the frequent display of the rod of Asclepius, a winged staff with double-helix serpents created by ancient cultures who worshiped serpents and the demigods that tampered with human genetics.

Charles Darwin formulated his idea 50 years before genes, 100 before the double helix, and 150 before the human genome was read. But they all say the same thing. Life is a chemical reaction. Life is derived from what came before. Life is imperfect copying. Life is the accumulation and refinement of information embedded in DNA. Natural selection explains how, once it had started, life evolved on Earth. We busy ourselves refining the theory, and working out the details with a scrutiny and precision that has been enabled and invigorated by reading genome after genome, and crunching those numbers until comprehensible patterns emerge. We are the data.

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick’s paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.

and Muller deepened this understanding by demonstrating that genes were physical—material—structures carried on chromosomes. Avery advanced this understanding of genes by identifying the chemical form of that material: genetic information was carried in DNA. Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin solved its molecular structure as a double helix, with two paired, complementary strands.

If your personal genome sequence was written out longhand, it would be a three-billion-word book. The King James Version of the Bible has 783,137 words, so your genetic code is the equivalent of nearly four thousand Bibles. And if your personal genome sequence were an audio book and you were read at a rate of one double helix per second, it would take nearly a century to put you into words!

DNA molecule, as you will almost certainly remember from countless television programs if not school biology, is made up of two strands, connected by rungs to form the celebrated twisted ladder known as a double helix. Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome.

The Three Sisters offer us a new metaphor for an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth. I think of the corn as traditional ecological knowledge, the physical and spiritual framework that can guide the curious bean of science, which twines like a double helix. The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges. And so all may be fed.

By then Watson and Crick had a pretty good idea of DNA’s structure. It had two sugar-phosphate strands that twisted and spiraled to form a double-stranded helix. Protruding from these were the four bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, now commonly known by the letters A, T, G, and C. They came to agree with Franklin that the backbones were on the outside and the bases pointed inward, like a twisted ladder or spiral staircase. As Watson later admitted in a feeble attempt at graciousness, “Her past uncompromising statements on this matter thus reflected first-rate science

Being a rape victim just sucked, for a while. Sometimes, though, without meaning to be, I was proud: I have suffered, and that entitled me to something, but I didn’t know what. Everyone seemed to be reaching deep into the crevices of their souls to find oozing gobs of pain, and if that pain was parented by some distant generation that spent brutal winters chasing diminishing herds after its own numbers had dwindled from the settler’s diseases and brute force, it seems ever more potent, wrapped around our DNA double-helixes. A pain so old begins to feel like predestination, locking every generation into more, whether that’s the truth or something I tell myself because I like the pain. Even more, I savor the twisted prestige of inheriting old hurts most people only read about in history books.

Being a rape victim just sucked, for a while. Sometimes, though, without meaning to be, I was proud: I have suffered, and that entitled me to something, but I didn’t know what. Everyone seemed to be reaching deep into the crevices of their souls to find oozing gobs of pain, and if that pain was parented by some distant generation that spent brutal winters chasing diminishing herds after its own numbers had dwindled from the settler’s diseases and brute force, it seems ever more potent, wrapped around our DNA double-helixes. A pain so old begins to feel like predestination, locking every generation into more, whether that’s the truth or something I tell myself because I like the pain Even more, I savor the twisted prestige of inheriting old hurts most people only read about in history books. ~ 93-94

Al Hershey had sent me a long letter from Cold Spring Harbor summarizing the recently completed experiments by which he and Martha Chase established that a key feature of the infection of a bacterium by a phage was the injection of the viral DNA into the host bacterium. Most important, very little protein entered the bacterium. Their experiment was thus a powerful new proof that DNA is the primary genetic material. Nonetheless, almost no one in the audience of over four hundred microbiologists seemed interested as I read long sections of Hershey’s letter. Obvious exceptions were André Lwoff, Seymour Benzer, and Gunther Stent, all briefly over from Paris. They knew that Hershey’s experiments were not trivial and that from then on everyone was going to place more emphasis on DNA. To most of the spectators, however, Hershey’s name carried no weight.

Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in ritual transubstantiations. Poets had declared that to be is to be a variable of light, that this peach, and even this persimmon, is light. But the peach which mediated between light and the appetite for light interfered with the taste of light, and obscured the appetite it aroused. The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols. But the simple instruction, promulgated during the Primordification, to taste the source of the food in the food, led to the ability to eat light. Out of the attempt to taste sources came the ability to detect unpleasant chemicals. These had to be omitted. Eaters learned to taste the animal in the meat, and the animal's food and drink, and to taste the waters and sugars in the melon. The discriminations grew finer - children learned to eat the qualities of the pear as they ate its flesh, and to taste its slow ripening in autumn sunlight. In the ripeness of the orange they recapitulated the history of the orange. Two results occurred. First, the children were quick to surpass the adults, and with their unspoiled tastes, and their desire for light, they learned the flavor of the soil in which the blueberry grew, and the salty sweetness of the plankton in the sea trout, but they also became attentive to the taste of sunlight. Soon there were attempts to keep fruit of certain vintages: the pears of a superbly comfortable autumn in Anjou, or the oranges of Seville from a year so seasonless that their modulations of bouquet were unsurpassed for decades. Fruit was eaten as a retrospective of light. Second, children of each new generation grew more clearly, until children were shaped as correctly as crystals. The laws governing the operations of growth shone through their perfect exemplification. Life became intellectually transparent. ("Desire")

One of the most powerful tools for discovering structure is ‘X-ray diffraction’ or, because it is always applied to crystals of the substance of interest, ‘X-ray crystallography’. The technique has been a gushing fountain of Nobel prizes, starting with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays (awarded in 1901, the first physics prize), then William and his son Laurence Bragg in 1915, Peter Debye in 1936, and continuing with Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and culminating with Maurice Wilkins (but not Rosalind Franklin) in 1962, which provided the foundation of James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s formulation of the double-helix structure of DNA, with all its huge implications for understanding inheritance, tackling disease, and capturing criminals (a prize shared with Wilkins in 1962). If there is one technique that is responsible for blending biology into chemistry, then this is it. Another striking feature of this list is that the prize has been awarded in all three scientific categories: chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine, such is the range of the technique and the illumination it has brought.

In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin had. Looking at the pictures, she suspected that DNA was a spiral-shaped molecule—a helix. But Franklin was relentlessly methodical, refusing to indulge in flights of fancy before the hard work of collecting data was done. She kept taking pictures. Two other scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, did not want to wait. Up in Cambridge, they were toying with metal rods and clamps, searching for plausible arrangements of DNA. Based on hasty notes Watson had written during a talk by Franklin, he and Crick put together a new model. Franklin and her colleagues from King’s paid a visit to Cambridge to inspect it, and she bluntly told Crick and Watson they had gotten the chemistry all wrong. Franklin went on working on her X-ray photographs and growing increasingly unhappy with King’s. The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins, was under the impression that Franklin was hired to work directly for him. She would have none of it, bruising Wilkins’s ego and leaving him to grumble to Crick about “our dark lady.” Eventually a truce was struck, with Wilkins and Franklin working separately on DNA. But Wilkins was still Franklin’s boss, which meant that he got copies of her photographs. In January 1953, he showed one particularly telling image to Watson. Now Watson could immediately see in those images how DNA was shaped. He and Crick also got hold of a summary of Franklin’s unpublished research she wrote up for the Medical Research Council, which guided them further to their solution. Neither bothered to consult Franklin about using her hard-earned pictures. The Cambridge and King’s teams then negotiated a plan to publish a set of papers in Nature on April 25, 1953. Crick and Watson unveiled their model in a paper that grabbed most of the attention. Franklin and Gosling published their X-ray data in another paper, which seemed to readers to be a “me-too” effort. Franklin died of cancer five years later, while Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson would cruelly caricature Franklin as a belligerent, badly dressed woman who couldn’t appreciate what was in her pictures. That bitter fallout is a shame, because these scientists had together discovered something of exceptional beauty. They had found a molecular structure that could make heredity possible.

The helix contains two intertwined strands of DNA. It is "right-handed"-twisting upward as if driven by a right-handed screw. Across the molecule, it measures twenty-three angstroms-one-thousandth of one-thousandth of a millimeter. One million helices stacked side by side would fit in this letter: o. the biologist John Sulston wrote, "We see it as a rather stubby double helix, for they seldom show its other striking feature: it is immensely long and thin. In every cell in your body, you have two meters of the stuff; if we were to draw a scaled-up picture of it with the DNA as thick as sewing thread, that cell's worth would be about 200 kilometers long." Each strand of DNA, recall, is a long sequence of "bases"-A,T,G,and C. The bases are linked together by the sugar-phosphate backbone. The backbone twists on the outside, forming a spiral. The bases face in, like treads in a circular staircase. The opposite strand contains the opposing bases: A matched with T and G matched with C. Thus, both strands contain the same information-except in a complementary sense: each is a "reflection," or echo, of the other (the more appropriate analogy is a yin-and-yang structure). Molecular forces between the A:T and G:C pairs lock the two strands together, as in a zipper. A double helix of DNA can thus be envisioned as a code written with four alphabets-ATGCCCTACGGGCCCATCG...-forever entwined with its mirror-image code.

I’ve had strange moments throughout my life where it feels as though I am expanding infinitely out into the universe, as though every double helix of my DNA were unfurling. It felt like every atom of my body was being drawn back to the cosmos by some unseen force, and I was trying to return to whatever star I came from. In these moments I find myself desperately wanting to be held. But more than held -- stilled.

Francis Crick, co-winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, reportedly experimented with LSD while working on the problem. Though he never confirmed the rumors, friends insist that he told them he actually conceived of the double-helix shape during an LSD trip.*2

A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium.

Ten is formed from two pentagons and ten life-invoking pentagons sit perfectly arpund a decagon, and DNA, appropriately as the key to the reproduction of life, has ten steps for each turn of its double helix, so appears in cross-section as a tenfold rosette.

George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling. At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked.

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made [since that time] falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century." "The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity [i.e. the genetic code], with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes, and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same." The sequence of the human genome, the project asserted, marked the starting point of the "fourth phase" of genetics. This was the era of "genomics" - the assessment of the entire genomes of organisms, including humans. There is an old conundrum in philosophy that asks if an intelligent machine can ever decipher its own instruction manual. For humans, the manual was now complete. Deciphering it, reading it, and understanding it would be quite another matter.

Dr. Fanchon Quills.

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

Within five years of Röntgen’s invention, X-rays were considered essential for clinical care. In 1900, at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, 1.3 percent of all patients were X-rayed; by 1925, it was 25 percent. In 2009, a poll conducted by the Science Museum in London named the discovery of X-rays as more important than the discoveries of penicillin, computers, motorized cars, the telegraph, and the DNA double helix.

Though only about one half the mass of a bacterial virus was DNA (the other half being protein), Avery’s experiment made it smell like the essential genetic material.

O. T. Avery was carrying out experiments at the Rockefeller Institute in New York which showed that hereditary traits could be transmitted from one bacterial cell to another by purified DNA molecules.

Divine order from chaos - that is what the Blood does. The Blood of Jesus brings divine order into the chaos of your DNA, your DNA that is a double helix shape instead of being the perfect strand of the presence of God. God wants to give us perfection. The Bible says I am perfected in Christ (Hebrews 10:14).

The ladder these angels must climb was the double helix. And then they would be God. They, who were splinters of God.

I am sure this occasionally bothered Francis, even though he obviously knew that most High Table life is dominated by pedantic, middle aged men incapable of either amusing or educating him in anything worthwhile.

a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

Here’s James Watson, discoverer of the double helix, who describes himself as a libertarian: “I don’t believe we can let the government start dictating the decisions people make about what sort of families they’ll have.

WE MAY TALK ABOUT WATSON AND CRICK’S DOUBLE-HELIX DISCOVERY IN SCIENCE CLASS, BUT BRITISH CHEMIST ROSALIND FRANKLIN IS THE ONE WHO REVEALED DNA’S STRUCTURE.

The struggle between Jews and zombies would drag on, itself zombie-like, unless they found a way to pass beyond Jews and Zombies. The future. She was the future. New blood, and a new beginning. Breaking the old wheel of tradition. Helix and double-helix, and the doubling was a necessary part of the helix. She

The Psychopathology of CCD What am I doing tomorrow? Don’t ask me. Just follow the dance of my double helix, its sinuous spiral twisting like an impetuous nursery of stars on a collision course with the child care nebula. Maybe you can read my palm pilot for my schedule -- I’m just a drone serving the queen bee, serving some other queen, in some master plan unknown to me, possibly unknown even to the Omniscient Beeing, no longer smug in Her certainty, her kids rooting for the teat of extinction, thirsty, hungry, wet and gone clubbing all night. I can’t handle the stress anymore, pesticides, cell phone radiation, genetically modified crops, a Starbucks on every other block, global warming, gay marriage and now this economic crisis. Fuck it! I’m not going back to the hive. I’ve flying to Bali and opening up a yoga/dance studio with an organic café. “Wait! I’m coming with you.” “Me too!

The Long and Winding Silk Road We are cut of one cloth, so many feet to the bolt of silk that stands on a factory floor in Shenzhen to fashion Hawaiian shirts for Tommy Bahama and wedding Kimonos for Takashimaya in my dream. The factory goes bankrupt and the surplus silk sold, some ending up in the hands of a community theater for its production of the King and I. A swathe of white silk undulates across the high school auditorium stage, representing the frozen Ohio River in the play within a play. Silken strands of our DNA coil around each other to form a double helix and we are oblivious actors on a cosmic Silk Road, trading cultural memes in this human network, in a play within a play within a dream.

More than fifty years have passed since the flask experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey rekindled the primordial soup hypothesis for the origin of life. Scientists now realize, however, that generating miniscule amounts of a few amino acids is irrelevant to the origin of life because the chemicals in Miller and Urey’s experiment were exposed to neither oxygen nor ultraviolet light. The fact that Earth never possessed measurable quantities of prebiotics (see p. 73) and that the universe appears devoid of reservoirs for life’s fundamental chemical building blocks (see p. 74) also argues for the famed experiment’s irrelevance. As far back as 1973, a deep sense of frustration over any possible naturalistic explanation for life’s origin on Earth or anywhere else within the vast reaches of interstellar space led Francis Crick (who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix nature of DNA) and Leslie Orgel (one of the world’s preeminent origin-of-life researchers) to suggest that intelligent aliens must have salted Earth with bacteria about 3.8 billion years ago.[24] This suggestion, however intriguing or bizarre, fails to answer the question of where the aliens might have come from. It also contradicts evidence that shows intelligent life could not have arrived on the cosmic scene any sooner than about 13.7 billion years after the cosmic origin event. The implausibility of interstellar space travel also remains an intractable problem. Ruling out a visit by aliens from a planetary system far, far away narrows the reasonable options down to one: Something or Someone from beyond the physics and dimensions of the universe, who is not subject to them, placed life and humanity in the only location in the universe at the only time in cosmic history where and when such creatures could survive and thrive.

What this book means to impress is that family and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.

Are you trying to tell me that you’re genetically predisposed to having magical kisses? Like there’s some hinge in the double-helix reserved for psychic lips, and you scored all the necessary ancestors to procure some?

From the look of things, in five minutes every building facing the square would be locked up tighter than a Romulan clam.

Let me hit you with one other local legend, one that might seem particularly pertinent to the moment. Right next door to Turkmenistan is Uzbekistan, where, in 1940, Western scholars discovered the oral history of the Karakalpak people. They shared an epic, 20,000-line poem about a legendary group of warriors, called the Kirk Kuz, who would have been active in the early 1700s. There were forty of these warriors, and they were unparalleled in everything: horse-riding, marksmanship with a bow and arrow, throwing axes and knives, sword-fighting and every martial art imaginable. Strength, agility, cunning, nerves of steel—the DNA of these warriors had to be a double helix of sheer concentrated lethality. They repelled invading hordes and every man in every direction feared the ruthless, silent efficiency of the Kirk Kuz warriors. What makes the Kirk Kuz different is that they were all women, yet another group that may have inspired the legend of the Amazons. They only left their sisters in death or marriage.

When given this kind of a history, it is extremely interesting to compare these figures with the DNA double-helix.  In fact, the two depictions are easily found

Rosalind Franklin. She was instrumental in discovering the double helix in DNA, but it was two male colleagues, Crick and Watson, that got the Nobel Prize.

Since James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953,

The key to Linus’ success was his reliance on the simple laws of structural chemistry. The α-helix had not been found by only staring at X-ray pictures; the essential trick, instead, was to ask which atoms like to sit next to each other. In place of pencil and paper, the main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling the toys of preschool children

Two Nobel Prize winners attributed their breakthroughs to their use of LSD. Near his death, Francis Crick let it be known that his inner vision of the double helix of DNA was LSD enhanced. The chemist Kary Mullis reported that LSD helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction to amplify specific DNA sequences, for which he received the prize.

Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All

THERAPEUTIC #2: METFORMIN—THE LOW-RISK WONDER DRUG “Metformin may have already saved more people from cancer deaths than any drug in history.”12 —LEWIS CANTLEY, director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medical College Now let’s take a look at another amazing medicine, one that our friend Dr. David Sinclair and millions of other people utilize every day… metformin. The FDA-approved, first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes, metformin, is wildly popular in the longevity field. My coauthors Bob Hariri and Peter Diamandis have been taking it for years. So have futurist-par-excellence Ray Kurzweil and biotech entrepreneur Ned David. And so does Nobel Prize winner James Watson of double-helix fame, who once went so far as to say that metformin might be “our only real clue into the business” of beating cancer. When a recent anti-aging forum of 300 people was asked who was using this medicine to extend their healthspan, half the audience raised their hands. As David Sinclair says, metformin “might work on aging itself.”13

Hallowell writes: “Columbus was at play when it dawned on him that the world was round. Newton was at play in his mind when he saw the apple tree and suddenly conceived of the force of gravity. Watson and Crick were playing with possible shapes of the DNA molecule when they stumbled upon the double helix. Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter his whole life. Mozart barely lived a waking moment when he was not at play. Einstein’s thought experiments are brilliant examples of the mind invited to play.

The field of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, took a giant leap forward in 1953 with one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century: the molecular structure of DNA. This Nobel Prize–winning effort of Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of how genetic information is encoded and transmitted through the double helix. Or did it? Even decades after this seminal event, scientists do not agree on the definition of what constitutes a gene.1 We are endowed with 22,500 genes; some scientists think that less than 2 percent are helpful, whereas others assert that more than 50 percent are. As a result, we do not know what most of our DNA—comprising more than six billion letters—does. More surprisingly, even when there is agreement on the function of a particular bit of DNA, it is still a mystery how this DNA translates into a phenotype, or observable trait. The plain truth is that despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent every year by dedicated researchers globally, we don’t understand how evolution works at the molecular level.2 And this is a good—no, great—thing.

The field of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, took a giant leap forward in 1953 with one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century: the molecular structure of DNA. This Nobel Prize–winning effort of Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of how genetic information is encoded and transmitted through the double helix. Or did it? Even decades after this seminal event, scientists do not agree on the definition of what constitutes a gene.1 We are endowed with 22,500 genes; some scientists think that less than 2 percent are helpful, whereas others assert that more than 50 percent are. As a result, we do not know what most of our DNA—comprising more than six billion letters—does.

Even in the less-obviously creative fields of hard science, LSD can be profoundly beneficial. In fact, it played a role in the two biggest discoveries in biology of the 20th century. Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson, and Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), had both taken the drug, and attributed some of their understanding and insights to it. Mullis has gone so far as to say: "would I have invented PCR if I hadn't taken LSD? I seriously doubt it ... [having taken LSD] I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.

Today the minute researches of science no longer produce anything but an artificial stereophony, stereonomic and holographic effects (the DNA double helix is one of these), and this mere shadow-play is all one needs to manipulate appear ances. But the real that is caught in that way is eversive, if not indeed reversible. Under the subtle torture of science, all it ever confesses is its nonexistence. The more profound things become, the more they slip away, as they do in a concave mirror. The escape into transcendence, the assumption of the world into some upper realm (the Law, the Idea, God, the Truth) has been replaced by a process of evanescence toward the lower reaches, the narrow escape into immanence. Where the feminine resuscitates, without ideology, and without sexual hysteria either, in a joyous provocation, in a lascivious form of gratuitous self exhibition, of ironic scenography of a sex without desire. Light, transparent perversion. New allegory of the body.

don’t forget to include the fact that mutants eliminated the Islamic terrorist threat once and for all, and are largely credited with checking China’s rise to power. If not for us, you’d all be speaking Mandarin right now. Or Arabic.

By the end of 1939, 40,000 Americans had undergone involuntary, unconsented sterilisation. But at least nobody had been killed.

What we can see of DNA is like a portrait of someone familiar, from which some vandal has cut out the features that make the face instantly recognisable.

what about Erwin Chargaff’s tantalising match of the base ratios, A = T and C = G? Is this just another of nature’s coincidences? Or is it a vital clue that will somehow make sense of the whole sorry mess?

how does DNA control RNA? The structure of DNA must at least give us a hint.

As Andrew Kimbrell has noted, “When scientists James Watson and Francis Crick first described the double helix of DNA in 1953 it was considered a historic ‘discovery,’ which has been called ‘the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century’ and ‘one of the epic discoveries in the history of scientific thought.’”4 From a critical Indigenous perspective, Watson and Crick were to genes what Columbus was to the Americas or Captain Cook was to Hawai‘i. Once Westerners discover and name a creation of akua, whether it be land or genes, they begin to utilize and develop it, and eventually they must devise ways to legally claim it as their own property.

Mendel’s last forays into botany included the satisfying demonstration that even the greatest living scientists could be wrong. Armed with a fine paintbrush and a microscope, the poor-sighted abbot proved that a single grain of pollen was enough to fertilise an ovum – something that Charles Darwin had insisted was impossible.

Bohr argued that life was not infused into an organism by some mysterious ‘vital’ force but, like everything else in the universe, must be grounded in atoms and molecules that behaved according to the laws of physics and chemistry.

Phoebus Levene was characteristically blunt: ‘Nucleic acids carry no individuality, no specificity . . . It may be just to accept the conclusion of the biologist that they do not determine species specificity, nor are they carriers of the Mendelian characters.

They considered a number of structures DNA might have. There was more than one possibility, you see. But they pursued the famous double helix because of its beauty. Because it was a spiral staircase fit for life itself to climb, like a lady elegantly ascending to natures present multiplicity. Their intuition proved correct. Beauty is what led them to the truth, Gabriel. May it do the same for us.

to stand for “periphery.” It is hard to ignore the ubiquity of pi in nature. Pi is obvious in the disks of the moon and the sun. The double helix of DNA revolves around pi. Pi hides in the rainbow and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water, pi emerges in the spreading rings. Pi can be found in waves and spectra of all kinds, and therefore pi occurs in colors and music, in earthquakes, in surf. Pi is everywhere in superstrings, the hypothetical loops of energy that may vibrate in many dimensions, forming the essence of matter. Pi occurs naturally in tables of death, in what is known as a Gaussian distribution of deaths in a population. That is, when a person dies, the event “feels” the Ludolphian number. It is one of the great mysteries why nature seems to know mathematics.

They’re working on a third Peptide Nucleic Acid (pna) strand—a synthetic hybrid of protein and dna—to upgrade humanity’s two existing dna strands from double helix to triple. In so doing, these scientists “dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world—both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly,

This relies on the second component which is a protein that can act like a pair of molecular scissors, cutting across the DNA double helix. These scissors don’t cut randomly; they don’t just flail across the genome. Instead, they only cut where the guide molecule has inserted itself into the DNA.

Shut up and calculate!” certainly doesn’t sound appealing if you’re not mathematically inclined. But, even if you’re a physicist, what’s the virtue in shutting up and calculating? Mermin himself provided the answer in his 1989 article. “It is a fact about the quantum theory of paramount importance which ought to be emphasized in every popular and semi-popular exposition, that it permits us to calculate measurable quantities with unprecedented precision.” Quantum physics works. The calculations enabled by the theory are astonishing in their range of applicability and the accuracy of their results. Quantum physics tells us how long it will take to heat up your frying pan to cook your eggs and how large a dying white dwarf star can be without collapsing. It reveals the exact shape of the double helix at the core of life, it tells us the age of the immortal cattle on the rock walls at Lascaux, it speaks of atoms split beneath the stone heart of Africa eons before Oppenheimer and the blinding light of Trinity. It predicts with uncanny accuracy the precise darkness of the blackest night. It shows us the history of the universe in a handful of dust. If shutting up is the price of doing these calculations, then pass the ball gag and break out the graph paper.

Findings have become common on brain-like processes outside of the skull. The conductive structure inside the heart, like pacemaker cells, which organizes the heartbeat, can be known as the brain of the heart, just as the intestine's brain is the ganglion cells in the gut. Conduction system independence is shown when a transplanted heart continues to beat even though the nerves that connected it to the central and peripheral nervous systems of the donor have been severed. The interaction between the independent processing of the heart and that of the brain is complex and not fully understood. The trillions of bacteria that outnumber the cells of the body by ten to one are even more enigmatic, residing mostly within the digestive tract but also on the skin and in the brain and other organs. We think of these bacteria as pests, but these micro-organisms were simply introduced in vast stretches along the double helix of human DNA over eons. The consequences are immense and essentially uncharted for what we call "being alive" The bacterial part of the body, taken as a whole, is called the microbiome. It is not sitting on the skin or in the gut passively, nor is it invading the body. Actually, the microbiota is the barrier between "in here" and "out there," containing DNA, antibodies, and chemical signaling that allows the brain to do the same stuff. There is no clear role of the microbial DNA that is incorporated into our genomes, but at least this is ancestral material that we have assimilated as our own. More suggestively, this once-foreign DNA in all higher life-forms may be the swapping mechanism for genes. These discoveries demonstrate that our intelligence extends to the whole of ecology. Everywhere mentality has a physical basis. Any attempt at isolating it in the skull comes up against serious objections. Instead of treating cynicism with unbounded consciousness, we need to see that every perception is unbounded. By going beyond the illusory boundaries of the disconnected body, you cannot see, hear or touch anything in the universe. Watching a sunset is like watching yourself, actually.