Word: bacterium
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...fever, certain tumors, common colds. At Princeton Dr. Stanley grew acres of tobacco plants, infected them with the disease known as tobacco mosaic, ground up their wizened leaves, extracted their juices. This liquid was highly infectious to normal plants. But the deadly principle could not be cultured like a bacterium. Dr. Stanley found that it could be digested - that is, destroyed - by certain enzymes such as pepsin. This was important. Pepsin digests only proteins. Finally, using an ammonium compound which nudges proteins out of solution, Dr. Stanley isolated the virus as white crystals. When diluted 100,000,000 times...
...report followed closely after another from Dr. Link having to do with crown gall, a local infection of apple trees which superficially at least resembles cancer in animals. Crown gall and cancer are both proliferations of unhealthy cells. Botanists have long known that the gall is caused by a bacterium, Phytemonas tumefaciens. Dr. Link succeeded in inducing galls by application of heteroauxin, keeping the bacterium away from the scene of operation...
...whispering of "indifference" into your ear as an evil characteristic must be as trite as the fame of the cry "Reinhardt." Yes, Harvard has such a bacterium. But, like some bacteria, it is not harmful and rather good. Only the word itself is poor; it gives the wrong connotation. For a Harvard man's indifference is not mere disregard of people, studies, football games--although there are cynics in every society, but a thoughtful desire to let the business of others alone, to let each individual dress and act as he pleases. Communists and New Dealers alike are safe...
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is caused by a microscopic speck which may be an especially tiny bacterium or an especially big virus. Bacteriologists cannot decide which. It is transmitted to man by a tick called Dermacentor andersoni, which in an unknown manner migrated and adapted itself to the greenery of the Appalachian foothills...
...physicians described illnesses which they called "rabbit fever," "deer-fly fever," "a plaguelike disease of rodents." In 1912 Drs. George Walter McCoy and Charles Willard Chapin of the U. S. Public Health Service isolated a new organism from sick ground-squirrels in Tulare County, Calif., named it Bacterium tularense after the county. Not until 1921 did Dr. Edward Francis of the U. S. P. H. S. discover that all the variously-named illnesses were the same disease, caused by Bacterium tularense. He named it tularemia. Periodically thinning out the rabbit population by thousands, tularemia also affects many another small animal...