Word: amoeba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chemistry of living things, no substances are more important than two that stand on the threshold between nonlife and life: ribonucleic acids (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA). Nothing can live without some kind of RNA, and the kind of RNA it produces, which determines whether it will become an amoeba or a mammoth, is in turn determined by its DNA, the template of heredity. Last week two U.S. physician-scientists were named winners of the 1959 Nobel Prize ($42,606) in medicine for having synthesized giant molecules...
...Immortal Amoeba. Gerontology has confirmed that some of age's limitations are imposed by nature herself. One-celled organisms such as the amoeba, because they reproduce by forever growing and dividing, are the only true immortals. Man, like all other multicelled organisms in both animal and vegetable kingdoms, is foredoomed to aging changes and ultimate death. But the rate and nature of these changes are far from constant. There are wide variations even among animals of a single species in a state of nature, and naturally they are vastly wider among human beings, living under infinitely more varied conditions...
...sickly attraction and grisly revulsion. Jean Paul Sartre, contributing an enthusiastic forward, explains: "If we take a look at what goes on inside people, we glimpse a moiling of flabby, many-tentacled evasions . . . Roll away the stone of the commonplace and we find running discharges, slobberings, mucous; hesitant amoeba-like movements. [Nathalie Sarraute's] vocabulary is incomparably rich in suggesting the slow, centrifugal creeping of these viscous, live solutions...
...times the size of Rhode Island-overreaching Los Angeles County, enveloping adjacent Orange County to the south. It is the nation's fastest-growing megalopolis, with a population (6,000,000) exceeding that of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada combined. And, like an energized amoeba, it is bewilderingly fertile...
...side, he enters a "semi-cataleptic" trance and "goes away" into his leg, clearing up the gangrene as the amazed Olga watches. Egmont is soon keen "to forget all knowledge, live my organic life, flourish like a vegetable." But when Egmont is well on his way to becoming an amoeba, Olga gets panicky, has him insulin-and electro-shocked back to everyday life. Egmont rather sheepishly admits that maybe man had better develop the mind he has rather than try to lose it in matter. The author's further notion that mental progress is some kind of communal process...