Word: bacterium
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...that potential benefits from the ingenious new technique of genetic engineering far outweigh any dangers that it could pose. Last week scientists testifying before a Senate subcommittee lent strong support to that argument. They revealed that a group of California researchers has spliced a man-made gene into a bacterium, and then, for the first time, used the altered microbe to make a copy of a mammalian brain hormone that can act biologically in humans. The accomplishment brought closer the day when scarce and costly hormones and enzymes needed for treatment of genetic disorders can be produced inexpensively...
...important step in this direction had already been taken last spring when scientists at the University of California in San Francisco succeeded in transplanting a rat insulin gene into the DNA of a laboratory strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli. The bug then multiplied into countless duplicate bacteria, each containing the insulin gene, but incapable of producing insulin. In the work announced last week, Microbiologist Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco, along with Biochemist Arthur Riggs of the City of Hope Medical Center near Los Angeles and Physiologist Wylie Vale of the Salk Institute in San Diego...
...confirmed that 24 people have died of Legionnaires' disease in 19 states since the Philadelphia epidemic. It also suspects there may be as many as 2,000 undetected cases a year. Though scientists believe that the culprit is a slow-growing, rod-shaped (as yet unnamed) bacterium, they do not know where it lives in nature, how it spreads or why it is so lethal. Only one thing seems sure. The bug was almost certainly around, even if misdiagnosed, long before the Legionnaires gathered for their ill-fated convention in Philadelphia...
...Jordan to cooperate in the immunization of 5,000 Muslims living in Israel or occupied territories who will be making the pilgrimage.) Arab governments are so concerned that this week they will hold a 20-nation meeting in Cairo to decide on the best protective measures. The comma-shaped bacterium (Vibrio cholerae) responsible for cholera finds its natural breeding ground in the human bowel, and is excreted in the feces. The disease can be contracted only by drinking-or bathing and washing in-water containing human fecal matter, from fruits or vegetables contaminated by such water, or from food prepared...
Leprosy was imported into Hawaii by Chinese laborers in the 1840s. The bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, found a fertile field in the Polynesian population, which, with no prior exposure to the disease, had no natural defenses. Soon hundreds of new cases were being reported annually. The panic that had swept Europe during its epidemics centuries earlier was repeated in Hawaii. In 1865, King Kamehameha V ordered all lepers confined to the most desolate part of his realm, the volcanic, 14-sq.-mi. peninsula of Kalaupapa jutting northward from the coast of Molokai. The first 35 patients were landed in January...