"We have a lot of cash and capability and we're going to be very patient, because I think you have a very good chance inflation will be more than transitory."
- & Jamie Dimon, 1956 – present, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JP Morgan Chase
Fed Opens the Door to Higher Rates to Keep Inflation Contained
What makes humans human? Even though the human hereditary material known as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which is the molecule that carries genetic information from one generation to another, was first identified in the late 1860s by a Swiss chemist called Johann Friedrich Miescher, its crucial role in determining genetic inheritance wasn't demonstrated until the discovery of its molecular structure in 1953 by Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Francis Crick.
Up to that point, the scientific community was aware that DNA was most likely the molecule of life, but nobody had the slightest idea of what that molecule might look like. In order to determine its exact structure – how all the atoms fit together and what shape resulted – the pair used stick-and- ball models to test their ideas. They were able to determine that DNA had a unique 'double helix' shape, like a twisted ladder (see depiction on page 2), and that it replicated itself by separating into individual strands, each of which becoming the template for a new double helix.
This was indeed a breakthrough in the study of how genetic material passes from generation to generation, for which Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1962. A few years later, Watson published "The Double Helix", his classic personal account of their groundbreaking discovery.
It was Watson's book that inspired Jennifer Doudna who read it as a sixth-grader and realized 'that a woman could be a great scientist' and that you could 'hunt for the reasons why nature worked the way it did'. Her life story from a curious young girl growing up in Hawaii to a world-renowned scientist is chronicled in distinguished historian and biographer Walter Isaacson's latest book "The Code Breaker", in which he recounts the dramatic story of the rivalry over a powerful gene-editing technology, and what it took for her to defy the odds as a woman in a male-dominated field.