MOLECULAR FLMMAKER

摘要

Early every morning, before dawn if he can, Hashim Al-Hashimi goes running. Six miles, rain or shine, summer heat or bitter Michigan cold. His chosen route is hilly for a reason. Just at the uphill crests-when the muscle pain is sharpest and the body most wants to quit-that's when his mind is sharpest. "Most of my thinking is at the top of a hill," he says. It was one such push that led to his biggest innovation in molecular visualization. Using a computer algorithm he developed and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, Al-Hashimi recorded the atomic-scale contortions of RNA and DNA, long thought of in biology as relatively inflexible structures.