Word: bug
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These natural transfers can be crucial to the survival of the bacterium. It is through new plasmids, for example, that bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus have become resistant to penicillin. The plasmid acquired by the staph bug contained a gene that directs the production of a penicillinase, an enzyme that cracks apart invading penicillin molecules, making them ineffective. Different plasmids, sometimes passed from one bacterium to another, can order up still another kind of chemical weapon, a so-called restriction enzyme, which can sever the DNA of an invading virus, say, at a predetermined point...
Laboratories can be designed to prevent the escape of potentially dangerous organisms. But there is always the chance that something or someone will fail-and that a few virulent bugs will slip through the safeguards to multiply in the outside world. Faced with this problem at the Asilomar conference. Geneticist Roy Curtiss III proposed an ingenious solution: Why not convert the standard genetic research organism, a strain of the E. coli bacterium, into a seriously weakened mutant variety that would quickly self-destruct if it escaped the laboratory? Curtiss volunteered to engineer the new bug, and his colleagues agreed...
Official Thaw. It is a moment of some importance, for it signals an official thaw in Soviet attitudes to the cultural avant-garde of the past. Before Lenin died and the hand of Stalin squashed experimental art like a bug, the link between "revolutionary" art and revolutionary politics in Russia was closer than it has ever been in the West. The idealist abstract order of works like Lissitzky's Proun, 1919, was deeply connected to social visions of Utopia: when Tallin designed his extraordinary spiral tower as a monument of the revolulion, there was no doubt in his mind...
...aroused deep-seated German concern other than that of nuclear annihilation. The weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel disclosed that agents of the Verfassungsschutz (federal office for the protection of the constitution) had broken into Traube's home near Cologne last year, photographed his letters and documents and planted a bugging device. After failing to discover any guilt in his associations, the agents surreptitiously entered Traube's house a second time two months later to remove the bug. These legally questionable acts evoked memories of Nixon-era plumbers and led many Germans to wonder whether the Verfassungsschutz, which is roughly...
...they decided against dismissing him immediately on the theory that he might go underground and threaten nuclear revenge. Nine days after the OPEC raid, an agent interrupted Traube on a skiing holiday at St. Moritz to ask him about Klein; meanwhile, others broke into his home and planted the bug...