Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Yesterday I tried to make photocopies of the zine, but my parents' photocopier kept jamming the pages (especially frustrating you're doing two sided copies). So I decided to go find a copy shop. My mother suggested a kinko's about a mile away that she wasn't sure was still in business. Guess what? It's not there. But the library was only another block away and it had a big BOOK SALE sign so I went in. Found an old (1962) book The Genetic Code by Isaac Asimov (Isaac Asimov is the answer to: Who has written books in all ten Dewey Decimal categories?) Picked it up and looked through it, was amused to see page 92, which says:

Suppose you had a peptide chain of thirty amino acids, as in insulin.

I initially interpreted that to mean that Isaac Asimov thought that insulin is a peptide chain of thirty amino acids, but writing this, I think maybe he means the factual statement that insulin contains a peptide chain of thirty amino acids (insulin contains two peptide chains, and the B chain in humans has thirty amino acids. The A chain has twenty one, so insulin has a total of fifty one amino acids).

No comments: