Word: amoeba
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...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...
...migrations from south to north have carried with them hookworm, whipworm and ascarides. Immigrants in the thousands from the West Indies have brought the parasites of schistosomiasis and filariasis. Hookworm, whipworm and Schistosoma mansoni began to appear in northern cities only in 1950; years ahead of them were the amoeba (a cause of chronic dysentery) and pinworm. Estimated schistosomiasis cases in New York City, 70,000; in Chicago, 2,200. ¶When a small boy swallowed a nail which lodged in the jejunum (second part of the small bowel), Atlanta's Dr. Murdock Equen made him swallow a tiny...