Word: canker
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Some species, most of them insects, benefit increasingly from man's activities. Their attacks on his toothsome crops are as old as recorded history-the Bible often refers to plagues of locusts, canker-worms, lice and flies-but their damage was only sporadically serious when population was small and scattered. Modern, large-scale agriculture offers a paradise for plant-eating insects. Crops are grown year after year in the same or nearby fields, helping insect populations to build up. Many of the worst pests are insect invaders from foreign countries that have left their natural enemies behind...
...frequent cause of eyeball-scarring infections in the U.S., and for no known reason it is becoming commoner. Its scars are the main reason for corneal transplants. Its cause is the versatile virus herpes simplex, which usually does no more harm than to touch off annoying fever blisters or canker sores in the mouth, but may cause blindness if it reaches the eyes, or even death if it attacks the brain...
Herpes Simplex ("fever blisters," many "canker sores"). Grown in tissue culture, but no vaccine in sight. Smallpox vaccine sometimes used in severe cases...
...underlying the humor. The father who gets kicked in the groin has been trying to make up to his small son for his orphaned state. The husband and wife who belabor each other seem right off the burlesque stage, but the story's aim is to expose the canker that lies at the heart of comedy. Ohio-born James Purdy, 34, writes in a manner that is all his own, using a prose at once precise and clumsy, almost as if he had learned English well but late in life. People "grunt" out entire sentences, voices "darken" at listeners...
...Beaverbrook hankered to succeed Winston Churchill in Britain's dark days of 1941 and 1942, says Driberg, and suffered such intense inner conflict between the "canker of ambition" and his genuine friendship for Churchill that, racked with psychosomatic asthma, he quit the Cabinet in the "supreme nervous crisis of his life...