Word: bacteriologists
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Gram-negative bacteria -- so named because they do not retain a laboratory stain devised by the Danish bacteriologist Christian Gram -- are usually harmless. They reside on the skin and in the gut, where they aid in digestion. But any significant disruption to the body's immune response -- caused, for instance, by severe burns, chemotherapy or major abdominal surgery -- allows these rod-shaped bacteria to multiply out of control and invade other parts of the body, eventually entering the bloodstream. Once there, one part of the bacterial cell wall called endotoxin can trigger a cascade of lethal effects, culminating in multiple...
Another practitioner is a slight, intelligent, no-nonsense woman of 63, who treats ailments as varied as cancer, AIDS and multiple sclerosis in a cluttered studio apartment in Manhattan. A onetime bacteriologist, she had no psychic experiences until after the death of her husband, when she began hearing voices and seeing visions and "thought I was losing my mind." When she began to study these phenomena, she became convinced that unseen doctors were working through her. "I am not a mystical person," she says, "but I have learned to accept many, many things. I know my doctors are geniuses...
...Also, unlike bacteria, these agents could apparently not be grown in culture dishes, where scientists hoped they might form colonies large enough to be seen with the naked eye. The source of such diseases as mumps, smallpox, yellow fever, rabies and dengue remained a mystery. And yet, wrote frustrated Bacteriologist William Henry Welch in 1894, "these are the most typically contagious diseases, which it might have been supposed would be the first to unlock their secrets...
...British and a French scientist independently noticed the appearance of clear circular spots in laboratory cultures grown over with bacteria. When material from a clear spot was applied to a different location in the bacteria culture, another circular area devoid of bacteria soon appeared. Felix d'Herelle, the French bacteriologist, thought he knew why. "What caused my clear spots," he wrote, "was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria." D'Herelle named the unseen bug a bacteriophage (from the Greek phage, to devour...
DIED. Rebecca C. Lancefield, 86, bacteriologist, who in 1928 was the first to identify which streptococci are chiefly responsible for causing human disease, and systematically went on to categorize more than 60 different types, including those that cause strep throat, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys; in New York City. Lancefield joined Manhattan's Rockefeller University as a technical assistant in 1918 because "it was the only place that answered my job letters," and continued to work there until last November...