Word: bacterias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These snippets can now be incorporated into bacteria to create, in effect, new microorganisms whose potential for causing disease in plants, animals or man himself is as yet unknown and cannot be predicted...
Soon after Britain's Dr. Douglas Bevis (see story above) abruptly quit his work on fertilization-implantation techniques, eleven eminent U.S. investigators, including one Nobel laureate, Dr. James D. Watson, declared that they are halting certain experiments in genetic manipulation of bacteria. Their reason: fear that if they do not stop, they may inadvertently loose upon the world new forms of life-semisynthetic organisms that could cause epidemics, or resist control by antibiotics, or increase the incidence of cancer...
...president of Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Thomas is also a gifted writer with wit, imagination and a bold, encouraging vision of both man and nature. His main theme is symbiosis, the intimate association between even the most dissimilar organisms. For example, he points out that bacteria called rhizobia live in the roots of bean plants and enable them to utilize the nitrogen in the soil; without these parasites the plants would die. There are also viruses-small, independent packets of nucleic acids -which Thomas believes may have helped man evolve by transmitting bits of the master...
Thomas argues elegantly that it is when our bodies forget the importance of living symbolically with other organisms that we contract disease. Most bacteria are not dangerous to man. The man who catches a meningococcus, as the biologist emphasizes, is in considerably less risk of losing his life than the meningococcus unlucky enough to catch a man. It is man's overreaction to many germs, a sort of immunological overkill, that puts him at risk, since his weapons for fighting off bacteria are so powerful that they endanger him as much as they do invaders. Most people, for example...
...tear out crucial pages, making the books useless to other students. Pre-meds are also not above doctoring each other's laboratory work, adding extra ingredients to a classmate's chemistry experiments, or coughing in somebody else's culture dishes-thus starting unwanted bacteria colonies that ruin experiments. Caryn Lum, 20, a Stanford University senior who was recently accepted by two medical schools, tells of a friend who placed his samples from a qualitative analysis laboratory in an oven to incubate overnight; when he went to check them in the morning, they were gone-presumably stolen...