Word: bugs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...trailers; many were sleeping in automobiles. Drillers, riggers, roughnecks and roustabouts packed the juke-joints and short-order cafes (dry Snyder has no bars). Trucks hauling oil derricks half a block long kept the courthouse square grey with dust. With new motor courts, hotels, office buildings and theaters abuilding, bug-eyed citizens of Snyder were predicting a population of 30,000 by next year...
Many doctors believe that the common cold is caused by a virus. Dr. Leon T. Atlas of the U.S. Public Health Service has been so sure of it that since 1947 he has been growing a sub-microscopic bug that seemed to be the guilty party. At Bethesda, Md. he nurtured his virus first in the noses of willing victims, then in hen's eggs. The strain, known as MRI, be came the world's No. 1 biological curiosity...
...Bug Eat Bug. Every place that is favorable for the growth of micro-organisms (and most places are) is a churning battleground of small, fierce creatures. A pinch of moist soil weighing one gram, for instance, may contain more bacteria (up to 2 billion) than there are people on earth. Among the ordinary creatures prowl savage protozoa engulfing them one by one. There is an underworld, too, made up of submicroscopic viruses, hardly more than big molecules, which often invade the larger organisms and multiply explosively...
...part of this incessant struggle: most, if not all, of the little creatures that cause man's diseases have enemies nearer their own size which can kill them off with chemical weapons. The warfare among the bugs* is called "antibiosis," and the chemical weapons of war are "antibiotics." Searchers for new antibiotics figuratively let bug eat bug; then the medical men take over the chemical weapons of the microscopic battlers and use them against the enemies...
Russian officials in the four-power city control board had lately consented to a joint battle against the potato bug. They agreed that East & West should honor each other's postage stamps-and then urged the West Berliners to buy stamps cheaper with soft Soviet marks ("Every agreement we make, we lose," lamented a U.S. official...