Nucleic acids are large biomolecules that are crucial in all cells and viruses. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomer components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA). If the sugar is ribose, the polymer is RNA; if the sugar is deoxyribose, a variant of ribose, the polymer is DNA.
1953 (MCMLIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1953rd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 953rd year of the 2nd millennium, the 53rd year of the 20th century, and the 4th year of the 1950s decade.
Deoxyribose, or more precisely 2-deoxyribose, is a monosaccharide with idealized formula H−(C=O)−(CH2)−(CHOH)3−H. Its name indicates that it is a deoxy sugar, meaning that it is derived from the sugar ribose by loss of a hydroxy group. Discovered in 1929 by Phoebus Levene, deoxyribose is most notable for its presence in DNA. Since the pentose sugars arabinose and ribose only differ by the stereochemistry at C2′, 2-deoxyribose and 2-deoxyarabinose are equivalent, although the latter term is rarely used because ribose, not arabinose, is the precursor to deoxyribose.
Reinhold Andreas Messner is an Italian climber, explorer, and author from the German-speaking province of South Tyrol. He made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest and, along with Peter Habeler, the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. He was the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, doing so without supplementary oxygen. Messner was the first to cross Antarctica and Greenland with neither snowmobiles nor dog sleds and also crossed the Gobi Desert alone. He is widely considered to be the greatest mountaineer of all time.
Nanga Parbat, known locally as Diamer, is the ninth-highest mountain on Earth and its summit is at 8,126 m (26,660 ft) above sea level. Lying immediately southeast of the northernmost bend of the Indus River in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Nanga Parbat is the westernmost major peak of the Himalayas, and thus in the traditional view of the Himalayas as bounded by the Indus and Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra rivers, it is the western anchor of the entire mountain range.
Hermann Buhl was an Austrian mountaineer. His accomplishments include the first ascents of Nanga Parbat in 1953 and Broad Peak in 1957.
In chemistry, a phosphodiester bond occurs when exactly two of the hydroxyl groups in phosphoric acid react with hydroxyl groups on other molecules to form two ester bonds. The "bond" involves this linkage C−O−PO−2O−C. Discussion of phosphodiesters is dominated by their prevalence in DNA and RNA, but phosphodiesters occur in other biomolecules, e.g. acyl carrier proteins, phospholipids and the cyclic forms of GMP and AMP.
The year 1953 involved numerous significant events in science and technology, including the first description of the DNA double helix, the discovery of neutrinos, and the release of the first polio vaccine.
"Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was the first article published to describe the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, using X-ray diffraction and the mathematics of a helix transform. It was published by Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the scientific journal Nature on pages 737–738 of its 171st volume.
Alexander Rawson Stokes was a British physicist at Royal Holloway College, London and later at King's College London. He was most recognised as a co-author of the second of the three papers published sequentially in Nature on 25 April 1953 describing the correct molecular structure of DNA. The first was authored by Francis Crick and James Watson, and the third by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling.
Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene was a Russian-born American biochemist who studied the structure and function of nucleic acids. He characterized the different forms of nucleic acid, DNA from RNA, and found that DNA contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group.
A deoxyribonucleotide is a nucleotide that contains deoxyribose. They are the monomeric units of the informational biopolymer, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Each deoxyribonucleotide comprises three parts: a deoxyribose sugar (monosaccharide), a nitrogenous base, and one phosphoryl group. The nitrogenous bases are either purines or pyrimidines, heterocycles whose structures support the specific base-pairing interactions that allow nucleic acids to carry information. The base is always bonded to the 1'-carbon of the deoxyribose, an analog of ribose in which the hydroxyl group of the 2'-carbon is replaced with a hydrogen atom. The third component, the phosphoryl group, attaches to the deoxyribose monomer via the hydroxyl group on the 5'-carbon of the sugar.
Harold Armstead Covington was an American neo-Nazi activist and writer. He advocated the creation of an "Aryan homeland" in the Pacific Northwest and was the founder of the Northwest Front (NF), a white separatist political movement that sought to create a white ethnostate.
Odile Crick was a British artist best known for her drawing of the double helix structure of DNA discovered by her husband Francis Crick and his partner James D. Watson in 1953.
National DNA Day is a United States holiday celebrated on April 25. It commemorates the day in 1953 when James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and colleagues published papers in the journal Nature on the structure of DNA. Furthermore, in early April 2003 it was declared that the Human Genome Project was very close to complete, and "the remaining tiny gaps were considered too costly to fill."
The 2013 Nanga Parbat massacre was a terrorist attack that took place on the night of 22 June 2013 in Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan. About 16 terrorists, reportedly dressed in Gilgit−Baltistan Scouts uniforms, stormed a high-altitude mountaineering base camp and killed 11 people; 10 climbers and one local tourist guide. The climbers were from various countries, including Ukraine, China, Slovakia, Lithuania and Nepal. A Chinese citizen managed to escape the assailants, and a member of the group from Latvia happened to be outside the camp during the attack. The attack took place at a base camp on Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain on Earth. The mountain is popular among trekkers and mountaineers, and is typically toured from June to August because of the ideal weather conditions during these months.
The following events occurred in July 1953:
The Mazeno Ridge is an arête, a long narrow ridge, and part of the Nanga Parbat massif in Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan, in the Himalayan range. The ridge is the longest of any ridge on the eight-thousander peaks in the Himalayas. A series of eight subsidiary peaks form the ridge, the highest being Mazeno Peak at 7,120 metres (23,360 ft). All eight subsidiary peaks have been climbed, but a complete traverse of the ridge and ascent of Nanga Parbat was only successfully achieved in 2012, and as of 2019, no other expedition has reached the summit of Nanga Parbat via the Mazeno Ridge.
During the 1953 German–Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition, Hermann Buhl succeeded in making the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest mountain in the world. He reached the summit on 3 July 1953. This remains the only instance in which an 8,000-metre summit was first reached by an individual climbing alone. The expedition was led by Karl Herrligkoffer who subsequently led numerous attempts to climb other eight-thousand meter peaks in the Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges.
Karl Maria Herrligkoffer was a German medical doctor, who from 1953 and 1986, organized and directed numerous German and Austrian mountaineering expeditions including 13 expeditions to five of the world's highest peaks in the Himalayas and the Karakoram. There were some notable successes on these expeditions including the first ascent of Nanga Parbat (8126m), and also the second and third ascent of that mountain, the successful ascent of Everest (8849m) by 15 people from one expedition, the first ascent of the South Ridge of K2 (8611m), the first attempt on Broad Peak (8051m), and the first ascent of about 35 peaks during two expeditions to east Greenland.
