Word: bacterias
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Electron microscopes are much more powerful than microscopes using light, but conventional models have a great disadvantage: they cannot be used on living cells or organisms. Their pictures of bacteria, for instance, show dried-up husks that do not resemble living bacteria any more than ancient Egyptian mummies resemble living men. But last week a new-type electron microscope in Toulouse, France, was taking pictures of bacteria that are still alive and reasonably healthy...
...focus on the far side. The object shows as a shadowed picture because some parts of it stop more electrons than others. Since electrons are scattered by air, the interior of the instrument must be an almost perfect vacuum, which would dry up and kill almost instantly all living bacteria...
...French microscope at the Toulouse Electron Optics Laboratory is housed in a shining aluminum sphere 78 ft. in diameter. Professor Gaston Dupouy, head of the laboratory and the microscope's chief operator, explains that he protects bacteria by enclosing them in a tiny air-filled cell that fits on the microscope's stage. The cell has two windows, one on the top, the other on the bottom, which are covered with collodion film less than four-millionths of an inch thick. The windows are so small (four-thousandths of an inch in diameter) that this gossamer stuff...
...Lederberg's current interests extend into space in a way that pauperizes science fiction. Working under a Rockefeller Foundation grant, he and his Stanford team are designing and building a prototype apparatus that can be landed on, say, Mars or Venus, and can send back information about possible plants, bacteria, viruses or other micro-organisms. Landed gently on the planet's surface, the machine would automatically run out a long tongue with an adhesive surface. This would pick up plants or micro-organisms in the soil and reel them beneath the lens of a fixed microscope. A television camera would...
Joshua Lederberg, 35, is a balding biologist?and a genius. At 21, the studious son of a New Jersey rabbi, he was already making significant contributions to genetics. Working with his teacher, Edward Tatum, at Yale, he demonstrated that bacteria have a sex life of sorts. At 27, in collaboration with one of his own students at the University of Wisconsin, Lederberg discovered that bacteria infected with certain viruses may suffer hereditary changes. His work on this process, known as transduction, won him a Nobel Prize. Now, at Stanford's School of Medicine, Lederberg's latest cause for excitement...