Word: bacterium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...genetic material called plasmids, which often provide a remarkable capability. The plasmids contain instructions enabling the microbe to produce enzymes that either destroy or immobilize the most powerful antibiotics. Floating freely within the cells, the plasmids can be transferred from one microbe to another. When this happens, a bacterium once vulnerable to a drug can acquire a resistance to it and, more important, pass that genetic defense on to its descendants...
...Francisco and at a small commercial research firm, Genentech Inc., in nearby Palo Alto, used human pituitary tissue to construct the gene, or DNA segment, responsible for the production of somatotropin. They then implanted it in the genetic machinery of a laboratory strain of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. The gene splicing worked: the re-engineered bugs began to make...
Judson wisely avoids such hyperbole. Even a generation after molecular biology's birth, its midwives are usually experimenting with nothing higher on the evolutionary ladder than the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. Judson's characters are not primarily interested in great practical payoffs but in a grand intellectual quest: solving puzzles, under standing nature rather than dominating it. The game is science for science's sake...
That suggested a possible link between the disease and planes carrying cholera-infected passengers. But a key question remained: If the cholera bacterium Vibrio cholerae were dumped from altitudes of 30,000 ft., where temperatures are below freezing, could it survive the journey to earth? Rondle and his colleagues simulated such air drops in their lab, subjecting V. cholerae to rapid freezing in droplets of water, followed by a quick thaw. Result: the durable bugs not only survived but actually flourished. Indeed the tests indicated that even a relatively small quantity of bacteria from, for example, an aircraft washbasin could...
...those applications - the recombinant DNA technique - has begun to fulfill its widely her alded promise. By inserting genes into the DNA of a laboratory strain of the common intestinal bacterium E. coli, re searchers have induced the little bug to produce somatostatin, a mammalian brain hormone. Last month the bacterium manufactured synthetic human insulin, raising hopes that the hormone vital to the well-being of the world's diabetics may some day soon be available in virtually unlimited supply...