he molecular world has always been part of my mental furniture. I grew up on the outskirts of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, famed for its research on energy, materials, and nuclear weapons. My dad was a physician and biomedical researcher who loved chemistry above all things, and who would interpret all of life’s vicissitudes in terms of some obscure chemical reaction or metabolic dysfunction. Learning chemistry, therefore, became a necessity for basic communication with my father. My neighbors were mostly physicists who would bring home spare bits and pieces from labs around the country. My friends and I sprayed rainbows of color on the bedroom wall with old prisms and played with a cube of depleted uranium metal that seemed impossibly heavy compared with the cubes of iron and aluminum that had been thoughtfully cut to exactly the same size. We were told that the uranium cube ...
Touching RNA
By Anna Marie Pyle TOUCHING RNA RNA can bind and sense the shapes of other molecules by feeling them with its backbone— and not just its bases. What gives RNA molecules this remarkable versatility? Illustrations by Magda Wojtyra he molecular world has always been part of my mental furniture. I grew up on the outskirts of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, famed for its research on energy, materials, and nuclear weapons. My dad was a
Written byAnna Marie Pyle
| 12 min read
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