Word: amoeba
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...Boston's matinee audience filed into Symphony Hall for a first hearing, Lennie was worried. His new opus had something like 25 themes, most of them growing out of a previous one "like an amoeba splitting off." Said he: "The one weakness may be that it has too much music. There is no padding ... no trills or flourishes. It's all music...
...Dictyostelium discoideum is no ordinary amoeba; its cells have hidden capabilities. Thousands of them will be grazing peacefully, paying no attention to one another. Then a few will drift together, forming a little clump. All the amoebae for microns* around stop their feeding and dividing. Like city people running to the scene of an accident, they swarm toward the growing center (see cut). Some join end to end and stream in gay little chains. By thousands and tens of thousands they pile up in a heap...
Many other biologists have studied Dictyostelium discoideum and related Acrasiales.* One slime-mold expert, Dr. K. B. Raper, of the Department of Agriculture, discovered (among other things) that the ultimate fate of the individual amoeba depends on how quickly it joins the aggregation. Latecomers form parts of the disc which supports the stalk; they die at the final breakup. The early birds form parts of the stalk itself; they die too. Only the middle-of-the-roaders, who arrive neither late nor early, live to continue the race...
Splitting and redoubling its complications with the speed of a Stakhanovite amoeba, neat and artificial as a nest of concentric Chinese boxes, this hypersymmetrical rake's progress is as stylized in its performance as in its structure. It is more like a puppet show than a flesh & blood comedy, and its dialogue is in dialect as formal as the colloquy of Mandarins. The puppets often strike tableaux which have charm, irony and even beauty, of a kind. But it is a kind so rigid and remote from simple human warmth that honest laughs come few & far between...
...Like amoebae and other one-celled protozoans, Dr. Jennings' creatures swallow and digest food, expel waste matter, multiply by the simple process of dividing themselves in two. But, unlike the amoeba, they also enjoy sexual relations. They mate by joining and exchanging nuclei...