Word: bacterias
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Double Vials. One way to quiet them down is freeze-drying. A culture of bacteria is set to growing in a nutrient broth...
Clark's microscopic sleeping beauties. The ATCC made more than 8,000 shipments in 1959. Disease germs went mostly to medical schools and drug companies (no amateurs need apply for plague or typhoid), but nonharmful cultures went to everybody who asked. High schools got standardized bacteria for biology experiments at the bargain price of $2 per vial...
Potency Restored. Using breathtakingly delicate techniques, Marmur and Doty extracted solutions of DNA from bacteria and heated them to the boiling point for ten minutes. When a solution cooled quickly, it was found to have lost nearly all its biological potency. If cooled slowly, taking several hours to get back down to room temperature, 50% of the moribund DNA regained its activity. When it was applied to living bacteria, it changed their hereditary characteristics by a process called "transformation," which is considered a test for the potency...
...molecules untwisted, separated into single strands with no biological potency. In quickly cooled solutions, the strands stayed that way. But when the solution was cooled slowly, the separated strands had time to find each other, and twist together and regain much of their power to transform living bacteria...
Chemical Hybrids. The Marmur and Doty process has almost frightening possibilities for tinkering with life. DNA from related species of bacteria can be mixed together, and the strands can then be separated. When the solution is slowly cooled, the strands often join with partners of the other species, yielding chemical hybrids that can be used to transform bacteria into living, reproducing hybrids. By a similar process DNA can be created that will give such properties to bacteria as resistance to antibiotics. There is no theoretical reason why chemical hybridization cannot be applied to higher organisms, the highest of which...