Word: cabeza
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca, 17th Marquis de Portago, thirsted for thrills. He found them in speed and sport. He was tempted by any activity tinged with danger, finally decided that the second-to-second uncertainty of auto racing brought him nearest to his heart's desire. When he wheeled his 3.8 liter fire-red Ferrari into the start of Italy's Mille Miglia last week, "Fons" de Portago was a happy man. Perhaps (although none can say) he died...
Chemical Trick. Some hormones are not difficult to make in this way. Syntex Inc. of Mexico City, for example, has been making sex hormones (testosterone, progesterone, etc.) out of an inedible wild yam called cabeza de negro, which yields a substance containing the four-ringed steroid nucleus. But cortisone is tougher. For one thing, its molecule has an oxygen atom attached to one of its carbon atoms (No. 11), and to place that oxygen in the correct spot is a difficult chemical trick...
Last week Syntex announced that a group of its chemists headed by Dr. George Rosenkranz had at last accomplished the feat, starting with diosgenin from cabeza de negro. They transformed it by 18 chemical steps to "Reichstein's Compound D,* which had been found in minute quantities in the adrenal gland, but had never been synthesized. Only three more steps were needed to turn this compound into cortisone...
...book right in his office. An accountant for the racketeers in the Cuban bolita (a version of numbers in which small numbered balls are shaken up in a burlap bag) told the committee that one weekly expense item meant money for the sheriff, scornfully designated in the books as "Cabeza de melon" or "Melon-head...
Syntex uses a vegetable raw material, cabeza de negro (niggerhead), a Mexican wild vine whose lumpy, woody root contains a soapy-feeling compound called sapogenin. In its raw state sapogenin is not a hormone, but its molecule contains the basic steroid nucleus.*This can be separated by a simple process and built up chemically into any number of hormonelike compounds...