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Technology
Neil Armstrong was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio on August 5, 1930, was the first American astronaut to walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong was 16 when he got his pilot's license. When he was at Purdue University for two years, he joined the navy and flew a fighter over Korea. He went back to Purdue, kept his space engineering degree in 1955, then he became a test pilot. He flew the x-15 rocket plane seven times at Edward's Air Force base. He was chosen as an astronaut in 1962. His first flight was in 1966, as the commander of Gemini 8. His flight was postponed due to a thruster failure. He was commander of the Apollo 11, as the first U.S. goal to land on the moon. At 22:56:20 Eastern Daylight Time, he put his left foot gracefully on the sandy lunar surface and said" That's one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind." He later proclaimed that it was supposed to be "For a man" but the static leaves this unclear. After his job as the deputy associate administrator for space, Armstrong retired from NASA and turned out to be a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati from 1971 to 1979 and after that a computer company executive. He was a vice-chairman of the presidential commission named to investigate the disaster of the Space Shuttle Challenger January 1986. Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914 in New York, N.Y. He graduated from New York University College of Medicine and obtained his medical degree. Later he went to the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. He taught preventive medicine and he became head of the University of Pittsburgh's Virus Research Laboratory. Salk researched on the influenza vaccine from 1942-1947 for the Army. The experience he gained prepared him for world fame. He then created the polio vaccine which immunized people against the disease, using the inactive polio virus. FRANCIS CRICK
1962 Nobel Prize for physiology. After studying the early X-ray studies of Wilkins on macromolecules, Watson and Crick were convinced that nucleic acids were constructed as a helix (looks like a spiral staircase)Working with the knowledge that chromosomes form replicas during cell division and that a chromosome was believed to be a string of DNA , they concluded that the DNA must form a replica of itself. By 53, James and Francis had determined the structure of DNA--a complementary double helix and published their work. They showed that each single helix of DNA served as a model for its helix and that the two strains unwound from the double helix during replication of the cell. These important findings opened the way to many advances in genetics. Crick studied how nucleotide sequences in DNA translate into amino acid sequences of a particular protein, working with other geneticists to try breaking this genetic code. He also studied virus structure and bacterial viruses; he later turned to brain research. Among his sometimes-controversial writings are Of Molecules and Men (66), Life Itself (82), What Mad Pursuit (88), and The Astonishing Hypothesis (94).
JAMES WATSON
The biologist James W., b. Chicago, Apr. ,28, helped determine the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid , the hereditary material of most cells. For this work he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with two British scientists, Crick and Wilkins. After earning a Ph.D. in animal study from Indiana College in 50 and doing postgraduate work on bacterial viruses in Copenhagen, Watson joined the Cavendish Laboratories at the College of Cambridge. In collaboration with Francis and using X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA from Wilkins, Franklin, and others, he worked to determine the exact chemical structure of the DNA molecule. In 1953, James and Francis succeeded in constructing a molecular model of DNA; they showed it to have a double helix arrangement likened to a spiral staircase. The two intertwined sugar-phosphate chains connected like "steps" with the flat base pairs, adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine. This model, known as the Watson-Crick model, had a profound impact on biology, opening new avenues of research in genetics and biochemistry. Subsequently, while working and teaching at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard College, Watson helped break the genetic code by determining how proteins are synthesized in the cell. In 68 he has became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology in New York, where he conducts cancer research. From 88 to 92 he was appointed head of the Office for Human Genome Research (see genome) at the National Institutes of Health. Watson's writings include Molecular Biology of the Gene (65; 4th ed., 86); The Double Helix (68; rev. ed., 80), in which he describes his award-winning work; and The DNA Story (81). |