Word: biochemists
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What a scientist does outside his laboratory is as absorbing to the global villagers of this electronic age as the personal foibles of the parish priest were to parochial villagers of an earlier time. Thus the biography of J.B.S. Haldane, British geneticist, biochemist, politician and honored boffin,* is doubly interesting. As one of the last great Victorian eccentrics, Haldane carried the belligerent confidence of that era into the conformist corridors of the mid-20th century. As an aristocrat turned Communist, he was a classic caricature of the greathearted scientist who, as social pundit, squanders the fame acquired in one field...
...aptitude for multiple delivery was what brought the armadillo to the attention of University of Texas Biochemist Roger Williams. The tough, armor-plated animal offered him a chance to check the theory that there is something in a fertilized egg cell besides genes that influences an animal's inherited characteristics...
...Braun, the biochemist in The Old System, wonders about the old standards of Jewish values that have led his relatives to both business success and family hostility. He recalls a resentful dying cousin who refused to see a rich brother unless he paid a $20,000 entrance fee to her hospital room. She believed that he had cheated her many years before. The preposterousness of the situation dissolves when brother and sister are reconciled in a scene that conveys forcefully the author's tragicomic sense of life. Even Dr. Braun, the scientist, is "bitterly moved" by the "crude circus...
...Fuel. Aboard the Alpha Helix, Biochemist Eberhard Trams of the National Institutes of Health discovered that the brain's control of the pituitary gland was a major factor in the sudden aging of the salmon. As the fish enters fresh water, he found, the pituitary quickly grows to more than twice its normal size, and the central nervous system fails to maintain control. The gland then triggers a metabolic speedup that burns away practically all of the fat in the salmon's body. Biochemist Andrew Benson, associate director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explains...
Clogging the Arteries. Both the pituitary gland changes and the loss of bone calcium in salmon are also familiar symptoms of aging in humans. "But in the fish," says Biochemist Trams, "the gland goes to hell in two weeks, a process that takes some 20 to 40 years in man." Thus the salmon makes an "ideal laboratory tool" for the investigation of geriatric ailments...