Oceanography

UNIT 1

1. What do we mean when we speak of science?

The word science comes from the Latin word "scientia," which means knowledge. Today, when we say “science,” we mean a particular type of intellectual inquiry that depends on a “scientific method.”

The scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of bias or prejudice in the experimenter when testing a hypothesis or a theory.”

2. The Scientific Method involves three things:

1. hypothesis - a proposed explanation

2. theory - a prediction

3. experiment - testing the theory

3. The Discovery of the Molecular Structure of DNA - The Double Helix

In April 1953 in the scientific paper where James Watson and Francis Crick presented the structure of the DNA-helix, the molecule that carries genetic information from one generation to the other.

What is DNA?

The work of many scientists paved the way for the exploration of DNA. Way back in 1868, almost a century before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins, a young Swiss physician named Friedrich Miescher, isolated something no one had ever seen before from the nuclei of cells. He called the compound "nuclein." This is today called nucleic acid, the "NA" in DNA (deoxyribo-nucleic-acid) and RNA (ribo-nucleic-acid).

Mendel was able to show that certain traits in the peas, such as their shape or color, were inherited in different packages. These packages are what we now call genes.

Genes were made up of nucleic acid.

DNA included different amounts of the four bases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (usually abbreviated A, T, G and C)

One was that the phosphate backbone wason the outside with bases on the inside; another that the molecule was a double helix. It was also important to figure out that the two strands run in opposite directions and that the molecule had a specific base pairing.

A theory is an intellectual construct that admits the possibility of being falsified. ...