Word: braine
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base one morning last week, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, Trevor Gardner bubbled over with guided-missile news. He had glowing words about the Falcon, an air-to-air missile with an electronic brain. Falcons will be carried by interceptors and fired at enemy bombers as much as five miles away. Then the electronic brain will take over, and the Falcon will track its prey across the sky, supersonically following every move the enemy makes to escape...
...last I came under a huge archway and beheld the Grand Lunar exalted on his throne in a blaze of incandescent blue . . . The quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within . . . Tiers of attendants were busy spraying that great brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining...
...many a thoughtful neurosurgeon, some drastic brain operations now in vogue are "like burning down the house to roast the pig." For two of the operations substitute methods are being suggested in hopes that the same amount of good can be done with less incidental harm...
Lobotomy. Despite many variations (TIME, May 28, 1951), this is still essentially a "blind" operation in which the scalpel (leucotome) makes a series of highly destructive stabs through unoffending brain tissue before the surgeon can feel sure he has cut the nerve bundles that join the thalamus (probably the seat of basic anxiety) to the frontal lobes of the cortex (where anxiety and pain are felt intellectually). Los Angeles' Dr. Tracy J. Putnam has devised a way of driving two hollow needles precisely into the chosen nerve bundles. These are then destroyed by seeds of radon (a radioactive...
Chemopallidectomy. An operation devised by Manhattan's Dr. Irving S. Cooper to relieve the uncontrollable tremor of Parkinson's disease. His earlier method (TIME, June 29, 1953), still risky and controversial, was to shut off one of the brain arteries. But many patients over 55 cannot tolerate this drastic technique, and it is among them that Parkinsonism is commonest. Now, Dr. Cooper works a plastic tube into the grey brain ball, injects procaine (which checks the tremor temporarily) to be sure he has reached the right spot, then injects absolute alcohol to do the job permanently...