Word: celling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Alongside the cell it is about to attack, the invader acts like an enemy agent skulking outside a big factory. Suddenly the virus slips into the complex living cell which, factory-like, has a definite schedule for receiving raw materials and processing them for the benefit of the whole organism. Either before or just after it slips in, the virus sheds its coat, a swatch of protein...
...over a captured industry. It seems to know where the production schedules and blueprints are-and it throws them away. In their place, it issues orders for the production of nothing but hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, plus an equal number of protein coats to fit. The cell-factory rushes to fill the massive order. It becomes strewn with waste materials. The strain tells. About the time the cell fills the invader's order and completes a myriad new molecules of nucleic acid, it falls into irreparable ruin. And just in time, the new molecules pick...
...drugs cannot affect true viruses. The effect is to leave the virus diseases supreme, and virologists are multiplying with a speed reminiscent of the particles they study. Having only in the last dozen years dug out the mechanics of viral cell invasion, researchers now know of fascinating variations in the process. Occasionally and inexplicably; they have learned, viral nucleic-acid particles enter cells and "go underground," lying there dormant or masked for years. Or the nascent "pro-virus" molecules of new nucleic acid may play possum in this way. Virologists are having to coin words such as virion, capsid...
...chemists like Stanley (who now runs the University of California's Virus Laboratory) and the electron microscopists, a virus can now be defined as an infectious particle that has no metabolism of its own and reproduces itself only by taking over the metabolic processes of the living cell it invades. Viruses are the ultimate parasites. They parasitize everything in nature from bacteria and flowering plants up through invertebrates such as mosquitoes, and the vertebrates from fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals...
...Closer Look. Thus viruses got defined and classified. But just how the virus core gets into a cell remained a mystery, even after Dr. Robley C. Williams, a member of Stanley's California team, devised the method of plating the particles with gold or uranium to get clearer electron micrographs. Then, two years ago at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, Drs. Sydney Brenner and Robert W. Home made an illuminating refinement on electron micrography, revealing far more intimate details of virus structures and differences, and clues to how viruses work...