Word: acidity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nowadays the very vocabulary of public discourse can be bewildering. Even to be half informed, the American-on-the-street must grasp terms like deoxyribonucleic acid, fantastic prospects like genetic engineering, and bizarre phenomena like nuclear meltdown. The technical face of things has driven some people into a bored sort of cop-out-"science anxiety," it is called by Physics Professor Jeffry Mallow of Loyola University in Chicago. The predicament has made most Americans hostage to the superior knowledge of the expert: the scientist, the technician, the engineer, the specialist...
...stuck with needles, and bewitched fruits were planted in their gardens. One devotee claimed she was used as a naked altar, raped, and smeared with chicken blood, to be used later to curse the foe. In the poison phase, clotheslines were doused with smallpox serum, garden tomatoes with formic acid, and doorknobs with caustic concoctions. One of the five cultists on trial with the swami admitted popping a poisoned chocolate into a victim's mouth (disliking the flavor, the victim spat it out). In stage three, an arsenal was allegedly assembled, and bombs were planted next to two houses...
...audaciously examined the most profound of all genetic questions: How do living things pass on characteristics from one generation to the next? The answer turned out to lie in the tiny, long-mysterious bits of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tucked away in the heart of every cell...
...phage group, a small band of mostly ex-physicists who decided to use bacteria-eating viruses as a kind of genetic scalpel; the virtually forgotten work of Rockefeller Institute's Oswald Avery; the painstaking efforts of scientists to explain exactly how DNA and its kin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), performed their magic; and finally the patient toil of Britain's Max Perutz, who unraveled the structure and precise workings of the blood's oxygen-carrying molecule that, in complexity of design, is to DNA what a skyscraper is to a town house...
Judy Bass as the Acid Queen suffers from an overdose of Tina Turner. Turner's Queen was full throated and nasty: she enjoyed her work and took no pains to hide that fact. Bass lacks the stage presence to carry it off, and in striving after open evil loses the chance to convey the more understated evil of Daltry's Queen. She never manages to portray a character that can convincingly sing "I'll show him what he could be now/just give me one night/I'm the gypsy, the Acid Queen/Pay before we start." Finally the chorus, though...