Century of discoveries: Interconnected tale of UW s most innovative research epiphanies · The Badger Herald badgerherald.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from badgerherald.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Economist Kaushik Basu spoke about India s tradition of “openness, tolerance and compassion” that Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna embodied and stressed the need to say no to hatred, while addressing students and teachers of Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous), Narendrapur.
Basu, Carl Marks Professor of International Studies in the department of economics and SC Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, New York, was speaking virtually on the occasion of the concluding programme of the diamond jubilee celebration of the college on Tuesday.
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Swami Suvirananda, the general secretary of Ramakrishna Math and Mission, said the inaugural function a year ago was held online and everyone then hoped the concluding ceremony would be conducted in a conventional manner.
More Fun Than Fun: The Joys and Burdens of Our Heroes 12/05/2021
Among the books I read as a teenager, two completely changed my life. One was
The Double Helix by Nobel laureate James D. Watson. This book was inspiring at many levels and instantly got me addicted to molecular biology. The other was
King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz, soon to be a Nobel laureate. The study of animal behaviour so charmingly and unforgettably described by Lorenz kindled in me an eternal love for the subject.
The circumstances in which I read these two books are etched in my mind and may have partly contributed to my enthusiasm for them and their subjects.
Har Gobind Khorana receiving NIH lecture award. (Image from the NIH)
This article is intended as an appreciation and a tribute to America, our adopted country, for its unusual penchant for inventions and innovations which have left a deep impact worldwide and for the future.
I was suddenly given to ponder over which peoples’ innovations,
thinking outside the box, had the greatest impact the world over and were most unique. I quickly realized that history is in the eyes of the beholder.
To the ‘sophisticated’ among us, usually drenched in the Eurocentric classics, the world’s progress seems to have been greatly stunted after Greece and Rome.
It was early in the morning on the 27th of May in 1961 when a young American biochemist named Marshall Nirenberg was able to read the first word in the genetic code of life. Like all great leaps, Marshall had to stand on the shoulders of genius to accomplish the task of reading the instructions for life on Earth.
By the middle 1950s, science had proven DNA is what species pass on to create future generations, but no one knew how. Chemically speaking, life was primarily water and protein. Proteins were combinations of 20 different amino acids linked in chains, but how did they get in the proper order? Today we know changing a single amino acid in the chain of almost 600 that makes hemoglobin protein can cause diseases like sickle cell anemia. Marshall and other researchers, Heinrich Matthaei, Maxine Singer, Robert Martin and Har Gobind Khorana, worked to crack the code in under five years, a problem most researchers thought would last a lifetime.