Blondes in Venetian Paintings, the Nine-banded Armadillo, and Other Essays in Biochemistry

Blondes in Venetian Paintings, the Nine-banded Armadillo, and Other Essays in Biochemistry PDF Author: Konrad Bloch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300070552
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Konrad Bloch muses on various aspects of biochemistry, explaining the chemical basis for many biological phenomena. Drawing on his own experiences as well as on colorful anecdotes about the work of other scientists, Bloch presents a new way of looking at the world and a revealing glimpse into the ways that scientific discoveries are made and problems are solved. Bloch begins with a charming essay on why--despite the fact that peroxide had not yet been invented--there are so many blonde women in Italian Renaissance paintings. He then considers, among other topics, some important biochemical processes that were discovered because of contamination; the importance of trial and error in biochemical research; the explanation of lactose intolerance in adults and practices for avoiding it; why the choice of animal models is important for medical research (and how the author injected himself with extracts of the tubercle bacilli to study the pathology of tuberculosis); and why the exotic nine-banded armadillo has unique potential for use in many areas of medical and biological investigations. He concludes with thoughts on biochemistry's origin and future.

Blondes in Venetian Paintings, the Nine-banded Armadillo, and Other Essays in Biochemistry

Blondes in Venetian Paintings, the Nine-banded Armadillo, and Other Essays in Biochemistry PDF Author: Konrad Bloch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300070552
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Konrad Bloch muses on various aspects of biochemistry, explaining the chemical basis for many biological phenomena. Drawing on his own experiences as well as on colorful anecdotes about the work of other scientists, Bloch presents a new way of looking at the world and a revealing glimpse into the ways that scientific discoveries are made and problems are solved. Bloch begins with a charming essay on why--despite the fact that peroxide had not yet been invented--there are so many blonde women in Italian Renaissance paintings. He then considers, among other topics, some important biochemical processes that were discovered because of contamination; the importance of trial and error in biochemical research; the explanation of lactose intolerance in adults and practices for avoiding it; why the choice of animal models is important for medical research (and how the author injected himself with extracts of the tubercle bacilli to study the pathology of tuberculosis); and why the exotic nine-banded armadillo has unique potential for use in many areas of medical and biological investigations. He concludes with thoughts on biochemistry's origin and future.

Flight from Wonder

Flight from Wonder PDF Author: Albert Rothenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 019998879X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Scientific breakthroughs have had far-reaching social and physical effects on modern civilization, yet until recently, there have been relatively few investigations into the nature of scientific creativity itself. Flight from Wonder reports the findings from an empirical study of 42 Nobel laureates in science from the United States and Europe concerning the creative processes that yield scientific innovation. To this end, Albert Rothenberg designed an interview scheme to delineate the content and sequences of processes that lead scientists to specific creative achievements. He conducted interviews with Nobel laureates in the fields of medicine, physiology, physics, and chemistry while carrying out matching interviews with a control group consisting of twelve accomplished engineers on the faculty of a leading engineering university. Rothenberg's results demonstrate that the Nobel laureates perform three distinct cognitive creative processes to achieve key formulations and discoveries; the detailed nature and structure of these findings were reviewed and corroborated by each of the Nobel laureates. To supplement his findings, Rothenberg engages with autobiographical accounts and work-in-progress manuscripts pertaining to the creative discoveries of outstanding scientists of the past including Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Hideki Yukawa, and James Watson. The book will interest students and general science readers fascinated by the development of scientific inquiry and innovation.

Biochemical Terminology

Biochemical Terminology PDF Author: Antony Mackinlay
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1669832244
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Languages are like organisms, they do not appear by spontaneous creation, they evolve, and so it is with the particular terminology of biochemistry which, as I document here, largely derives from Latin and Ancient Greek root words. In the early part of the 19th century, when chemistry had shaken off the shackles of alchemy, new elements, new compounds, new techniques were discovered that needed names. It was the classical languages, Greek and Latin, to which these early scientists turned. As chemical approaches were applied to biology, much molecular terminology has also derived from these languages. In this book the common technical terms encountered in biochemistry and related subjects are defined and their derivation from root words in Latin and Ancient Greek explained.

Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death PDF Author: Nick Lane
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393651495
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. “Nick Lane’s exploration of the building blocks that underlie life’s big fundamental questions—the origin of life itself, aging, and disease—have shaped my thinking since I first came across his work. He is one of my favorite science writers.”—Bill Gates What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight —how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness? Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells—what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane’s talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology’s great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.

Exobiology: Matter, Energy, and Information in the Origin and Evolution of Life in the Universe

Exobiology: Matter, Energy, and Information in the Origin and Evolution of Life in the Universe PDF Author: Julian Chela-Flores
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401150567
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Leading researchers in the area of the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the universe contributed to Exobiology: Matter, Energy, and Information in the Origin and Evolution of Life in the Universe. This volume provides a review of this interdisciplinary field. In 50 chapters many aspects that contribute to exobiology are reviewed by 90 authors. These include: historical perspective of biological evolution; cultural aspects of exobiology, cosmic, chemical and biological evolution, molecular biology, geochronology, biogeochemistry, biogeology, and planetology. Some of the current missions are discussed. Other subjects in the frontier of exobiology are reviewed, such as the search for planets outside the solar system, and the possible manifestation of intelligence in those new potential environments. The SETI research effort is well represented in this general overview of exobiology. This book is the proceedings of the Fifth Trieste Conference on Chemical Evolution that took place in September 1997. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam who suggested the initiation of the Trieste conferences on chemical evolution and the origin of life. Audience: Graduate students and researchers in the many areas of basic, earth, and life sciences that contribute to the study of chemical evolution and the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the universe.

Proteins, Enzymes, Genes

Proteins, Enzymes, Genes PDF Author:
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300153590
Category : Biochemistry
Languages : en
Pages : 814

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Book Description
In this book a distinguished scientist-historian offers a critical account of how biochemistry and molecular biology emerged as major scientific disciplines from the interplay of chemical and biological ideas and practice. Joseph S. Fruton traces the historical development of these disciplines from antiquity to the present time, examines their institutional settings, and discusses their impact on medical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural practice.

Origins and Evolution of Life

Origins and Evolution of Life PDF Author: Muriel Gargaud
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494597
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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Book Description
Devoted to exploring questions about the origin and evolution of life in our Universe, this highly interdisciplinary book brings together a broad array of scientists. Thirty chapters assembled in eight major sections convey the knowledge accumulated and the richness of the debates generated by this challenging theme. The text explores the latest research on the conditions and processes that led to the emergence of life on Earth and, by extension, perhaps on other planetary bodies. Diverse sources of knowledge are integrated, from astronomical and geophysical data, to the role of water, the origin of minimal life properties and the oldest traces of biological activity on our planet. This text will not only appeal to graduate students but to the large body of scientists interested in the challenges presented by the origin of life, its evolution, and its possible existence beyond Earth.

I'm No Angel

I'm No Angel PDF Author: Ellen Tremper
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925219
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Have you ever wondered why there are so many "dumb blonde" jokes--always about women? Or how Ivanhoe's childhood love, the"flaxen Saxon" Rowena, morphed into Marilyn Monroe? Between that season in 1847 when readers encountered Becky Sharp playing the vengeful Clytemnestra--about to plunge a dagger into Agamemnon--and the sunny moment in 1932 when moviegoers watched Clark Gable plunge Jean Harlow's platinum-tressed head into a rain barrel, the playing field for women and men had leveled considerably. But how did the fairy-tale blonde, that placid, pliant girl, become the "tomato upstair," as Monroe styled herself in The Seven Year Itch? In I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film, Ellen Tremper shows how, at its roots, the image of the blonde was remodeled by women writers in the nineteenth century and actors in the twentieth to keep pace with the changes in real women's lives. As she demonstrates, through these novels and performances, fair hair and its traditional attributes--patience, pliancy, endurance, and innocence--suffered a deliberate alienation, which both reflected and enhanced women's personal and social freedoms essential to the evolution of modernity. From fiction to film, the active, desiring, and sometimes difficult women who disobeyed, manipulated, and thwarted their fellow characters mimicked and furthered women's growing power in the world. The author concludes with an overview of the various roles of the blonde in film from the 1960s to the present and speculates about the possible end of blond dominance. An engaging and lively read, I'm No Angel will appeal to a general audience interested in literary and cinematic representations of the blonde, as well as to scholars in Victorian, women's, and film studies.

Introducing the Chemical Sciences

Introducing the Chemical Sciences PDF Author: Chemical Heritage Foundation
Publisher: Chemical Heritage Foundation
ISBN: 9780941901185
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
An introductory guide that is designed particularly for teachers and their students, but is useful in many other contexts. This new edition lists reference works; histories of science and technology; histories of the chemical sciences and industries including company histories; autobiographies and biographies; edited classical texts; and journals.

Comprehensive Natural Products Chemistry

Comprehensive Natural Products Chemistry PDF Author: Derek Barton
Publisher: Newnes
ISBN: 0080912834
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 8492

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Book Description
Comprehensive Natural Products Chemistry