Posted by:
concolor1
at Sat Aug 1 05:49:43 2009 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by concolor1 ]
www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/science/14rna.html
An English chemist has found the hidden gateway to the RNA world, the chemical milieu from which the first forms of life are thought to have emerged on earth some 3.8 billion years ago.
He has solved a problem that for 20 years has thwarted researchers trying to understand the origin of life — how the building blocks of RNA, called nucleotides, could have spontaneously assembled themselves in the conditions of the primitive earth. The discovery, if correct, should set researchers on the right track to solving many other mysteries about the origin of life. It will also mean that for the first time a plausible explanation exists for how an information-carrying biological molecule could have emerged through natural processes from chemicals on the primitive earth.
I'm not putting this up for you, though. Somewhere out there is a very bright kid, probably a science student somewhere, and if he's reading this and going through what I went through with a couple of "science" teachers, he may find enough wherewithal to persevere. I opted for the English Department--where my aptitude is actually less than my science one--as a means of preserving my sanity. The air can be pretty toxic here on Planet Utah in some classrooms . . .
You see, since I didn't have something like this to wrap my thinking around, I had to listen to these people hollering that there was such a thing as magic . . . Just not something I could believe in . . .
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Don't Read This One, Then . . . - concolor1, Sat Aug 1 05:49:43 2009