Word: bacterium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...life; variations among organisms were thought to involve only the number and type of proteins that are strung together. Now researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have found species + that defy certain words in the genetic scripture: in the familiar Paramecium, a single-celled protozoan, and in a bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum, the DNA patterns responsible for protein construction exhibit a surprising difference. Not only does the discovery undermine the "universality" of the genetic code, but it may cause scientists to rethink certain theories about evolution...
...first succeeded in growing in lab animals the microbe that causes leprosy, a breakthrough that enabled scientists to test potential treatments and preventive measures much more quickly; of an apparent heart attack; in Atlanta. In 1976, Shepard was also one of two CDC researchers who isolated the elusive bacterium that causes Legionnaires' disease...
...following is the most common venereal disease in the U.S.: 1) * syphilis, 2) gonorrhea, 3) herpes? Answer: none of the above. In fact, the most prevalent of all sexually transmitted diseases is one that few people have ever heard of: chlamydia. This disease, named for the tiny bacterium (Chlamydia trachomatis) that causes it, strikes between 3 million and 10 million Americans each year. The bug is also a hidden agent in as many as one out of every two cases of pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a painful, sometimes sterilizing infection that affects about 1 million American women each year. Chlamydia...
Then why are most Americans unfamiliar with it? For one thing, the bacterium that causes chlamydia could not be easily isolated and studied until 1965. "The bugs couldn't be grown in the laboratory, and people don't want to work with things that are difficult," says Julius Schachter, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Then, too, the presence of chlamydial infections until recently could be detected only by a complicated laboratory test that took up to seven days to complete and was offered at few medical centers in the U.S. As a result, chlamydia was rarely...
...Ward's staff member had been farther than Louisiana in 18 months. Even more baffling, the Florida Xanthomonas campestris bacterium is somewhat different from its common cousins: equipped with a vast arsenal of immunities and extra fatty acids, which give it strength, it is a particularly virulent strain...