British Protein Engineering

Piecework versus Timework in British Wartime Engineering

Piecework versus Timework in British Wartime Engineering The British engineering industry experienced extreme production and employment pressures during the rearmament period that preceded the Second World War and in the early war years. Did it react by placing a greater emphasis on incentive-compatible payment methods? This paper examines the relative employment and wage effects on pieceworker...

Protein engineering.

The prospects for protein engineering, including the roles of x-ray crystallography, chemical synthesis of DNA, and computer modelling of protein structure and folding, are discussed. It is now possible to attempt to modify many different properties of proteins by combining information on crystal structure and protein chemistry with artificial gene synthesis. Such techniques offer the potential...

Protein Engineering

Engineering therapeutic protein disaggregases

Therapeutic agents are urgently required to cure several common and fatal neurodegenerative disorders caused by protein misfolding and aggregation, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease (PD), and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Protein disaggregases that reverse protein misfolding and restore proteins to native structure, function, and localization could mitigate neurodeg...

Protein engineering: security implications

The rapid pace of research in the life sciences is generating a vast amount of new knowledge that has beneficial applications in industry, agriculture and medicine but could, in some cases, be misused for warfare and terrorism. This dilemma has not escaped the attention of security experts and politicians, who worry that infectious microorganisms could be genetically modified so as to increase ...