Word: bileful
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...demand for cortisone, as a treatment if not a cure, is already tremendous. In the DanviUe plant every few days (just how often is a Merck secret), chemical operators pour 1,500 lbs. of glistening white crystalline bile acid ($37,500 worth at quoted prices) into a 1,000-gallon still. In the still are hundreds of gallons of a solvent liquid with which the bile acid goes through its first reaction in its long, tedious process toward cortisone. Within hours this reaction is complete and a precipitant is added, causing Intermediate Compound No. 1 to separate from the solution...
...microbes (captured on a windowsill in Kalamazoo) perform a dozen complicated chemical processes, the Upjohn Co. has boosted production of cortisone and cut its price by 20%. Neck & neck in the same race, Schering Corp. can now get enough cortisone to treat a patient for three weeks from the bile of only two cattle (it used to take...
...such naturalness that it gives an immediate illusion of truth-to-life. Much of what he has to say is bitter to the point of savagery; and he is capable of heightening this grimness still further by laying on strokes of humor that seem to come from the bile of a grizzly bear. Only at his worst does he ever sound like a doctrinaire hack...
Scarce and expensive drugs are the potential jackpot payoffs of pharmaceutical chemistry. Right now one of the most valuable is the steroid hormone, cortisone, which sells at wholesale for $23 a gram. Reason: under present commercial methods, it takes the bile from 1,000 tons of cattle to make a month's supply of cortisone for a single arthritis patient...
Within a year, says Syntex, it hopes to make as much yam cortisone as is now produced from cattle bile. In three years, when its new $2,000,000 plant is finished, it hopes to supply enough cortisone for the entire U.S. demand...