Word: agent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thing that medicine's learned men once knew, or thought they knew, was that cancer is not infectious. Therefore, no "infectious agent" could be involved in its origin. Then a young (31) researcher just starting in at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, went to work on a sick Plymouth Rock hen. He took material from a tumor on the bird's breast, ground it ultrafine to smash the very cells, filtered the stuff through silica so that not even a broken cell could pass, and injected the liquid into healthy chickens. They soon developed cancers...
...brilliant young investigator, Dr. Francis Peyton Rous (rhymes with mouse), the discovery proved an embarrassment. Some colleagues smiled tolerantly, but many cancer researchers, even within his own institute, denounced the work as preposterous. "A filterable virus?" Bosh! This would be an infectious agent, and thus cancer, they argued, would be an infectious disease. Rous's experiments, they said, must have been defective. Some critics were not even shaken when Rous went on to find the viruses that caused other types of cancers in fowls and small mammals...
...when the air is moist enough, it works almost every time. The official Navy attitude is that the action of carbon black is "an interesting effect" that will have to be studied a great deal more before it can be rated as a promising rainmaking agent...
...concentrated, then, on the three short novels and five longer ones which are most congenial to his critical methods: "The Secret Sharer," "The Shadow Line," "Heart of Darkness," The Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. The method involves three great concerns--for prose style, for narrative technique and for the psycho-mythical element. The combination is not as confining as it sounds; a closely argued and integrated discussion of the first five novels cited above on these three bases covers them with commendable through-ness. Indeed, the chapters on Nigger and Lord...
...second to last section of Conrad the Novelist deals with the three political novels: Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. It is not, I think, an impressive as the first two hundred pages; there are excellent passages, particularly in the Nostromo chapter, but Guerard does not always reach the high level he maintains in treating the other novels...