Steven A. Benner – Författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
240 kr
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Are we alone in the universe? For half a century, Mars has seemed our likeliest nearby answer. Yet since the Viking landers touched down in 1976, no mission has returned to the Martian surface to search directly for life living there now.In Meet the Neighbors, pioneering astrobiochemist Steven A. Benner argues that this was a historic mistake. Drawing on the Viking archive and explaining how the scientific process failed, he re-examines the mission that first searched for extant Martian life and makes the provocative case that its results were misunderstood. In the decades that followed, Mars science focused on water, geology and past habitability, while the most direct question – is anything alive on Mars today? – was pushed aside.Benner shows why Mars remains the most accessible place to discover a second origin of life, and why finding even microbial organisms there would transform our understanding of our place in the cosmos. He also asks a deeper question: what counts as life in the first place? From the chemistry that may give rise to living systems to “agnostic” tools capable of detecting unfamiliar biology, he lays out a bold and practical blueprint for the next phase of exploration.At once a scientific detective story, a challenge to decades of orthodoxy, and a lucid guide to one of humanity’s biggest questions, Meet the Neighbors is the definitive, urgent brief on where to go, what to measure, and why the next discovery won’t just change textbooks – it will rewrite our place in the universe.
Redesigning the Molecules of Life
Conference Papers of the International Symposium on Bioorganic Chemistry Interlaken, May 4–6, 1988
Häftad, Engelska, 1988
1 062 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The organic chemist is rarely satisfied by a simple "explanation" of the reactivity of organic molecules. Rather, the chemist wants to go one step further, to "control" the behavior of molecules by altering their structure in a controlled way. This is, in fact, a rather stringent definition of "understanding," as it requires the "prediction" of behavior from structure (or structure from behavior). But it also places technical demands on the chemist. He must be able to synthesize the molecules he studies, characterize them at the atomic level of structural resolution, and then measure their behaviors to the precision that his explanation demands. Biological chemistry presents special problems in this regard. Although the tools for synthesis, purification, and structural characterization are now available for manipulating rather large biological macromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids in particular), the theory supporting these manipulations is inadequate. We certainly do not know enough to control generally the behavior of biological macromolecules; still worse, it is not clear that we know enough to design synthetic molecules to expand our understanding about how reactivity in such biological macromolecules might be controlled. Starting from scratch, there are simply too many oligopeptides to make; starting from native proteins, there are simply too many structural mutations that might be introduced.