Word: chain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Awards and accolades came to Fleming in rapid succession, including a knighthood (with Florey) in 1944 and the Nobel Prize for Medicine (with Florey and Chain) in 1945. By this time, even Fleming was aware that penicillin had an Achilles' heel. He wrote in 1946 that "the administration of too small doses ... leads to the production of resistant strains of bacteria." It's a problem that plagues us to this...
...singular contribution changed the practice of medicine. He deserves our utmost recognition. At the same time, we must bear in mind that the "Fleming Myth," as he called it, embodies the accomplishments of many giants of antibiotic development. Fleming is but a chosen representative for the likes of Florey, Chain, Domagk, Selman Waksman and Rene Dubos, many of whom remain, sadly, virtual unknowns. Their achievements have made the world a better, healthier place. In commemorating Fleming, we commemorate them...
...bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks of graphite moderator, with sliding neutron-absorbing cadmium control rods to regulate the chain reaction. Fermi, still mastering English, dubbed this elegantly simple machine a "pile...
...estimates he had charted with his pocket slide rule. At 11:30 a.m., as was his custom, he stopped for lunch. The pile went critical in midafternoon with the full withdrawal of the control rods, and Fermi allowed himself a grin. He had proved the science of a chain reaction in uranium; from then on, building a bomb was mere engineering. He shut the pile down after 28 minutes of operation. Wigner had thought to buy a celebratory fiasco of Chianti, which supplied a toast. "For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant," Wigner...
Watson's famous "Aha!" was but the last in a long chain. It was Crick who had fastened onto a chemist friend's theoretical hunch of a natural attraction between A and T, C and G. He had then championed the complementarity scenario--sometimes against Watson's resistance--as a possible explanation of "Chargaff's rules," the fact that DNA contains like amounts of adenine and thymine and of guanine and cytosine. But it was Watson who had first learned of these rules...