Word: bacterium
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...Bioengineered DNA was, weight for weight, the most valuable material in the world. A single microscopic bacterium, too small to see with the naked eye, but containing the genes for a heart-attack enzyme, streptokinase, or for 'ice-minus,' which prevented frost damage to crops, might be worth $5 billion to the right buyer." There is popularity in a passage like that. It bears information a man, even a casual-reading man, can do something with. Win a bar bet. Pass the time creatively on the scaffold with the hangman. It is skinny with legs. Crichton is Captain Reliable...
...Disbelief was quickly replaced by intense curiosity. What were these animals feeding on in the absence of any detectable food supply? How were they surviving without light? The answer, surprisingly, had been found by a Russian scientist more than 100 years earlier. He had shown that an underwater bacterium, Beggiatoa, lived on hydrogen sulfide, a substance that is highly toxic to most forms of life. The bacterium was chemosynthetic--as opposed to photosynthetic--getting its energy from chemicals rather than from...
...Lyme disease at all. Instead he had contracted human granulocytic Ehrlichiosis, or HGE -- a newly discovered tick-borne disease that has stricken at least 90 people in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin and a few other states since 1990, resulting in four deaths. The infection is caused by the Ehrlichia bacterium, a distant cousin of the microbe responsible for Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Fortunately, Quinn had gone to specialists who recognized the infection and cured him with the antibiotic doxycycline. "I had no idea it could be fatal," he says. "Looking back, I'm glad I didn't know the severity...
...seriously ill. And one, a 44-year-old man, didn't get the right treatment in time. Researchers fear that many more cases will turn up. "This disease could be as big as Lyme disease," says Dr. Darland Fish, an epidemiologist at Yale who in 1994 helped isolate the bacterium that causes hge. "I expect we'll see hundreds, if not thousands, of cases in the Northeast...
Progress toward developing a diagnostic test for the HGE bacterium has been slow. One of the companies that funded some of the key research has filed for bankruptcy. So far, only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and one other research lab have access to the bacterial samples. Experts cannot predict when an accurate diagnostic test will be available...