Word: alienment
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...Rahway, N.J., chemists at Merck & Co., the country's biggest prescription drug manufacturer, stare into video display computer terminals at brightly colored, twisting geometric shapes reminiscent of an alien virus in a science-fiction epic. The scientists are testing the action of a new drug on an enzyme through computer simulation. Says Merck Research Fellow Graham Smith: "Instead of taking a month to synthesize a new compound, we can now do it in a few minutes...
Other adults mesmerized Elvis as well. With a gravel-voiced, paunchy old carnival huckster, Colonel Thomas Parker, Presley zoomed from white gospel singalongs to gold-record celebrity. The Colonel, claims Goldman, was actually an illegal Dutch immigrant, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. According to Goldman, the manager's alien status would explain why Presley never played Europe or Japan...
...Irish, his scheme goes, developed a staunch belief in the futility of concerted and sustained effort to do much good. Oppressed by an alien culture and political power, while mired in hopeless poverty, the Celtic natives developed habits and a frame of mind that characterized them in the New World as lazy and improvident. Signs reading, "No Irish need apply," that freely hung around Boston, reflected more than prejudice, but the honest judgement of employers who could only use national origin to screen for stable workers...
...Fundamentalist tendencies are most entrenched in the lower middle class and in Egypt's universities, where they have mushroomed over the past four or five years. Says Dessouki of the converts: "These are people who are neither urban nor rural, who are overwhelmed by city life and feel alien to it. They are a very precarious class...
...Ayatullahs in Qum found his looks puzzling but nonthreatening; in Pakistan he was taken for a Pakistani; a teacher in Indonesia remarked admiringly: "You look like our Prophet." Such appearances were deceiving. Naipaul is a man of the West, through and through. He may have grown up as an alien in Trinidad, then a British colony, but his escape from that subjugation came not through mysticism or political revolution but through secular education, a mastery of Western intellectual traditions and the English language. His unique combination of experience and skills helped make him a distinguished novelist. In such non-fiction...