Word: cabezas
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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...
...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...
...Cabeza de Negro. The usual source of many promising steroid hormones is slaughterhouse products, e.g., glands. The supply is strictly limited; all the world's slaughterhouses together could not fill the present demand...
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...
...Mexican for zoot-suiter. † Watermelon, doughnuts, shampoo (in Spanish, sandla, rosquitas, lavar la cabeza) become guaramelon, donas, champu, in pocho. Outside the Folies Bergbre hawkers sell a pocho glossary...