Word: bacterium
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...James Hillier of the Radio Corporation of America displayed electron pictures of parasitic viruses attacking bacteria. The viruses (one four-hundred-millionth of an inch in diameter) looked like tadpoles with skinny tails and bodies. They penetrate the cell wall of the larger bacterium until they fill the whole cell...
...ZoBell has busied himself for years with the microflora of oil strata, including sea-bottom muds where oil is thought to be formed. His original idea was to study how bacteria modify crude oil (TIME, Dec. 17, 1945). But in 1943, he found in sea mud a comma-shaped bacterium which he named (he was only 38 at the time, and feeling in the pink) desulphovibrio halo-hydrocarbonoclasticus. He put it in a test tube filled with material to simulate a limestone oilsand. Four days later, oil bubbled out of the test tube's mouth. A little later...
...test tubes, streptomycin has destroyed the bacilli of tuberculosis and leprosy, the bacterium of tularemia. It has saved mice from dying of salmonella infections. Tested on human beings for toxicity, it has proved not dangerous...
...Danger. The U.S. endemic (localized) typhus kills only about 1% of its victims, mostly old people. But the same bacterium-like organism can cause the terrible European epidemic typhus, which is spread by human lice and kills from 5 to 70% of its victims, depending on the virulence of the organism. Apparently, living with a louse makes the germ vicious...
...Streptothricin protects mice against 10,000 times the ordinary lethal dose of Salmonella schottmülleri (paratyphoid fever organism), Escherichia coli (colon bacillus) and Bacterium shigae (cause of Shiga dysentery). The drug's usefulness against typhoid bacteria has not yet been tested in mice, but it is effective against test-tube typhoid...