Word: bacterium
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...Mount St. Helens finally erupting after weeks of ominous activity? A booby-trapped pineapple in the act of blowing up? In fact the remarkable photograph released by the microbiology laboratories of the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center in New York City shows a bacterium literally exploding after getting a dose of antibiotic...
...being tried by Biogen and other companies. Scientists chemically snip a gene from the DNA of one organism. The gene, which contains the code for producing a certain protein, is then chemically spliced into the DNA of another life form, usually a harmless laboratory strain of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. Now the genetically reprogrammed bug has the ability to produce something new. It begins cranking out the protein and, given the proper nourishment, making millions of carbon copies of itself, each capable of producing the same protein. Though each creates only a tiny amount, the cumulative output...
...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...