Word: bacterium
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...back. The genie is out of the bottle. A great majority of scientists also point out that no gene-spliced monsters, bacterial or otherwise, have yet escaped from the laboratory. What is more, there is a world of difference between splicing a viral gene or two into a humble bacterium and redesigning the complex genes of man, which now seems quite remote...
Almost all of E. coli's 4,000 genes are located in a single circular chromosome. But Cohen had isolated some bits of genetic material that float freely in the bacterium outside this main genetic repository. These bits of genetic "small change" are known as plasmids. A plasmid contains as few as three or four genes linked in a small circle, yet it sometimes is crucial to bacterial survival...
...Stanford University helped point the way to such miracles. They devised a relatively simple method for taking genes-which contain instructions for one or more inherited characteristics-out of one living organism and splicing them into the genes of another. The resulting hybrid, usually a variety of the common bacterium E. coli, then makes the substance ordered up by its new gene. So powerful a tool is recombinant DNA, as it is called, that the rapidly proliferating bugs can act like little microbial factories churning out great quantities of material...
Infant Botulism. Botulism usually comes from eating improperly canned food contaminated by toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Four years ago, researchers at the California health department found that babies with no obvious exposure to such canned foods were coming down with the disease. C. botulinum bacteria are ubiquitous. They thrive in the earth and are spread as spores through dust in the air as well as on vegetables, fruits or in honey. Adults regularly ingest the microbes but customarily suffer no harm. The spores remain dormant in the adult intestine. For as yet unknown reasons, the intestines...
Since 1975 there have been more than 400 reported cases of TSS, which is caused by the common Staphylococcus aureus bacterium and occurs primarily in menstruating women under 30. While fatalities have been few-only 40 have been recorded-the revelations about TSS disturbed tampon makers, who have built a market of 50 million regular users. First marketed in 1936 by Tampax, which had bought the patents for the product from the Colorado doctor who invented it, tampons are big business. All told, sanitary products account for roughly $800 million of the $10 billion spent each year on medical devices...