 FDA's
Serge Beaucage on Synthethic Oligonucleotides
Over the past two decades, building DNA and RNA molecules from scratch—fashioning what are known in the lingo as oligonucleotides—has become a cottage industry in virtually every biomedical laboratory in the world. These synthetic molecules are pervasively used in sequencing and in polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) amplification techniques, as potential therapeutic drugs against infectious diseases and cancer, and as diagnostic probes on DNA "chips," to name only a few applications. Automated oligonucleotide synthesizers are now de rigueur in most labs. None of these biomedical applications would have been achievable on such a timely basis without a technology known as phosphoramidite chemistry, in which oligonucleotides are synthesized by sequentially adding the desired
nucleotide units to an immobilized polynucleotide chain.
This revolution can be traced back to a single paper published in 1981 in an organic-chemistry journal called Tetrahedron Letters. The paper,
"Deoxynucleotide phosphoramidites—a new class of key intermediates for deoxypolynucleotide synthesis," (Tetrahedron Lett., 22[20]:1859-62, 1981) was written by Serge
L. Beaucage and Marvin H. Caruthers and has since been cited nearly 1,400 times. It was the breakthrough paper on oligonucleotide synthesis
that launched Beaucage on a career that has now included another eight papers cited more than 100 times each.
Beaucage, 48...
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Latin America: A Growing Presence
 atin America is steadily increasing its presence on the world scientific stage, according to a new Science Watch survey. As the graph
indicates, Latin America's world share of ISI-indexed scientific literature in all fields has more than doubled since 1981 and continues to trend upward sharply.
From less than 1.5% of ISI-indexed papers in 1981—roughly 5,600 papers for the entire region—Latin America's share of world science papers grew to about 22,500 in 2000, or 3.2% of the database.
For these statistics, Science Watch turned to ISI's
National Science Indicators database, 1981 to 2000. Above, percentage shares of world science are shown both for Latin America as a whole (31 nations in all, including South and Central America, along with Caribbean and West Indian countries such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic) and for Latin America's five most prolific nations in scientific...
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