Word: bacterium
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...still basically unknown. Yet this tiny parcel of protoplasm has now become the center of a stormy controversy that has divided the scientific community, stirred fears-often farfetched-about tampering with nature, and raised the prospect of unprecedented federal and local controls on basic scientific research. Last week the bacterium known to scientists as Escherichia coli* (E. coli, for short) even became a preoccupation at the highest levels of government...
...pursuing such bizarre fantasies; the real advances are exciting enough. About five years ago, California scientists learned how to combine genes from different organisms, regardless of how low or high they are on the evolutionary scale. Though the researchers added only one or two new genes to a bacterium's collection of thousands of genes, the creation of such hybrid molecules was a stunning feat. The accomplishment seemed to breach one of nature's more inviolable barriers. Even primates as closely related as gorilla and man are so different genetically that they cannot produce offspring. Thus...
...called plasmids-which consist of only a few genes. This extra bit of DNA-genetic small change, as it has been dubbed-serves a highly useful purpose. When two bacteria brush against each other, they sometimes form a connecting bridge. During such a "conjugation," a plasmid from one bacterium may be passed into the other...
Last week, after months of patient investigation, CDC officials in Atlanta proudly announced that one of the agency's researchers had apparently found the cause of Legionnaires' disease. The likely culprit: a hitherto unknown rod-shaped bacterium that also may have caused an unexplained outbreak of a pneumonia-like disease that killed at least 16 people in 1965 at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington...
McDade points out that there is still a small chance that the new bacterium may turn out to be a secondary invader rather than the disease agent itself. But for the moment, the disease sleuths think they have their bug and are now trying to fit the bacterium-which as yet does not even have a nickname-into its proper niche in the microbial world. They are also trying to answer major questions about it: How and where does it grow? How is it transmitted? (Legionnaires' disease is apparently not carried from one person to another.) One reassuring fact...