Word: bacterias
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...bankrupt. By that time, the French had moved 50 million cubic meters of earth?two-thirds of the amount moved at Suez. In the process, some 20,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever (whose causes were thought to be noxious jungle vapors and immoral living rather than bacteria-carrying mosquitoes). Originally known as "the Great Frenchman," De Lesseps came to be called "the Great Undertaker...
Scientists themselves sounded the first alarm when they began to fear that tampering with DNA, the basic molecule of life, might accidentally lead to the creation of new, uncontrollable strains of disease-carrying bacteria. Now most experts have decided they greatly overstated the dangers. But many laymen have remained frightened ever since research at Harvard designed to create new combinations of DNA in the bacterium Escherichia coli K12, or E. coli for short, stirred passionate debate last year (TIME cover, April 18). Last week, after long hearings, Congress was scheduled to act on two bills seeking to control such research...
...recombinant DNA research is safe. Some strains of E. coli normally reside in billions in the human intestine, a fact that encouraged the fear that new laboratory forms would spread like the plague among human beings. But research has shown that E. coli K12, which traces its ancestry to bacteria taken from a human patient at Stanford University in 1922, altered genetically during its life in the labs; among other changes, it can no longer colonize in human or animal intestinal tracts. Biologist H. William Smith, an expert on infectious diseases in animals, suggests that the deliberate creation...
...accelerating use of nitrogen fertilizers, which are converted by bacteria into nitrogen oxides that eventually rise into the stratosphere, could result in the destruction of as much as another 15% of the ozone layer. Most disastrous would be a large-scale nuclear war, which would blast enough nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere to reduce the ozone layer by as much as 70% for a period of from five to ten years. Even a slight increase in ultraviolet rays seems to cause a higher incidence of skin cancer, and a significant depletion of the ozone layer could cause far-reaching damage...
...material would have required a far more stringent level of physical containment in the lab than any yet available. Instead, they experimented with insulin genes from rats. Placing this foreign DNA inside enfeebled E. coli, they were delighted to find that the genetic material was replicated every time the bacteria divided. But the scientists do not yet know whether the rat genes -in the language of molecular biology -actually expressed themselves, that is, produced insulin...