Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome

Product Information

I would say in one go that you’ll learn about the ‘mother of all molecules’ – the molecule that makes everything else in the cell or makes molecules that make everything else. At the same time, you’ll get an inside look into how science works and what scientists are really like. Alexander] Gann at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, New York, a very fine scientist and also a science writer who edited the annotated version of The Double Helix, said, “You really should be writing this.” He’s been encouraging me all along. The last time I met him, he said, “Look, years have gone by. If you publish one more Nature paper, not many are going to read it. But if you write this book, you’re going to reach thousands of people. Not just half a dozen people who are going to read your paper in depth.” The na_sc_e cookie is used to recognize the visitor upon re-entry. It allows to record details on user behaviour and facilitate the social sharing function provided by Addthis.com.

His philanthropic initiatives include the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases and the Rothberg Catalyzer Prize.The author gracefully gives credit to as many people as he could although at times such an account becomes overwhelmingly too detailed. Students should be able to evaluate information relating to screening individuals for genetically determined conditions and drug responses. This cookie is set by pippio to provide users with relevant advertisements and limit the number of ads displayed. Because electron microscopy was in its infancy during most of this work, this meant that an older technique, x-ray crystallography, was the main tool used to decipher the structure of the ribosome. But x-ray crystallography created fuzzier, less detailed images than electron microscopy, so this led to the field being informally known as “blobology”.

Like Ditlev, the other Scandinavian I’ve had in the lab, she was intelligent, organized, pleasant, and cheerful and just generally well rounded. It made me wonder if Scandinavians are doing something right in the way they bring up their children, or whether taking them from dark Scandinavia and placing them farther south, even if only as far south as Cambridge, made them particularly cheerful and free of any Bergman-like angst." I remember reading Craig Ventner's book about racing to sequence the human genome. It read like a novel. I couldn't look away as Ventner spilled all the secrets about his personal life as well as all the nasty, behind the scenes antics that arise when scientists compete. I remember thinking he seemed a bit bitter, but I didn't care because I wanted to know everything I could about this usually hidden side of scientific discovery. Ramakrishnan's book is very similar in that it allows the reader to witness the arguments, insecurities, and questionable tactics scientists engage in when trying to outdo each other. Invented by engineer and entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg, such desktop gene machines could transform medicine, agriculture, nanotechnology and the search for alternative fuels. Using DNA sequencing, Rothberg says, doctors in the not-too-distant future will finger genetic weak spots in tumors and treat cancer patients with customized drugs. (This is already happening at some cancer centers.) Kids born with rare diseases will get large portions of their genome decoded to pinpoint the cause, eliminating guesswork and misdiagnoses.Gene technologies allow the study and alteration of gene function allowing a better understanding of organism function and the design of new industrial and medical processes (A-level only) Recombinant DNA technology (A-level only) The na_sr cookie is used to recognize the visitor upon re-entry. It allows to record details on user behaviour and facilitate the social sharing function provided by Addthis.com. Sometimes, the simplest questions are the most difficult to answer. One such is that of how many Indians have won the Nobel Prize so far. The figure can be as high as twelve, if you count Ronald Ross, Rudyard Kipling, Dalai Lama, V S Naipaul and Mother Teresa. Some or of Indian origin, or been born in India or left India too early in their career. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was a graduate of Physics from Baroda but immediately migrated to the US for further studies. He won the Nobel in Chemistry in 2009 for ribosome research along with two others. Ramakrishnan’s research strengthened our understanding of the fundamental processes of life and provided a clue to the evolution of modern species of life. This book is a combination of popular science and an autobiography with a seamless blending of the two. His life is devoted to research and learning. Then what happens is that you go to meetings and conferences. And you go give seminars at top universities. After your talk or at dinner people say, “You know, this is going to get a Nobel Prize someday.” And then it starts to slowly warp your thinking: “Maybe it is [true]. All these people are telling me. Not just my good friend, who is not objective. All sorts of people are telling me about this.” What it is really like to be a scientist, especially a scientist who has been awarded the “most nobel” scientific prize of all?

The na_rn cookie is used to recognize the visitor upon re-entry. It allows to record details on user behaviour and facilitate the social sharing function provided by Addthis.com. The theme of you as an outsider crops up several times in the book: an Indian who went to the west to make a career and a physicist who stumbled upon biochemistry. What’s been the biggest handicap and what’s been the biggest advantage for you as an outsider – a cultural and an academic outsider? I realised that this – the ribosome story – had an interesting human drama about it because of the way it evolved and the people [in it] and so on. Even while it was happening, I said [to myself] that this is going to make a good story someday. But the business from India was really strange because I’d left India when I was 19. I had almost nothing to do with Indian science except that I started coming to Bangalore and a few other places from about 2006. So the people who knew me in India were people in my field: molecular and structural biology. They knew my work. Nobody else cared about it. At all.It was this book, and it was gestating even before the Nobel Prize. Because as I said, [even] as events unfolded, this would make a great story. Soon after the Nobel Prize, I started collecting material for the book and interviewing people. In fact, some of the people I talked to are dead now. So it’s a good thing I interviewed them a long time ago. And then I thought this has been going on long enough. Of course, nobody had taken the slightest interest in honouring me in these ways during the many years after the key breakthroughs with the ribosome; without my having won the Nobel lottery, none of them would have given me a second thought - if they had thought of me at all. So there were really rewards of getting an award, and it reminded me of the line from Matthew 13:12: 'For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.'"

Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flatley claims the PGM poses no threat. "We've gone faster than anybody thought we could," he says. Indeed, his machines can crunch a thousand times as much data as the PGM. "That has relegated everybody else to niche markets." More proof: Illumina's shares are up 700% over five years. His team is working on many next-generation technologies that could render Ion Torrent obsolete, including one that will read a single DNA molecule. That's huge. Right now detection isn't able to do this and instead requires thousands of copies of molecules to be made. Rothberg grew up in New Haven, Conn. in a family of science-oriented entrepreneurs. His father, a chemical engineer, owns a company that makes high-performance adhesive for tiles. As a kid Jonathan went on sales calls with his dad. In college at Carnegie Mellon, where he majored in chemical engineering, he idolized Steve Jobs and went to hear him speak. He still has a 1982 Time magazine cover story on the Apple founder.

🍪 Privacy & Transparency

The enzymes restrict a viral infection by cutting the viral genetic material into smaller pieces at specific nucleotide sequences within the molecule. This is why they are called restriction endonuclease (‘endo’ means within) The problem, Rothberg says, is that technology simply hasn't been powerful enough to decode the genetic secrets lurking behind diseases like cancer, lupus and autism. As you may or may not remember from high-school biology, there are 6 billion chemical letters that make up the DNA double helix at the center of every cell. Some of it is probably genetic gibberish; a lot of functions are waiting to be discovered. But scattered throughout that DNA are 20,000 genes, the recipe books that tell the body how to make proteins such as insulin, muscle, hemoglobin, brain tissue, bone, clotting factor--virtually everything in our bodies. A single wrong letter hidden deep inside a gene can boost the risk of colon cancer or diabetes.