Word: cocci
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...fungus flourishes in the moist, warm environment of the lungs. In about 1% of victims, the disease spreads beyond the lungs through the bloodstream -- typically to the skin, bones and the membranes surrounding the brain, causing meningitis. "There was a time when I saw three new cases of cocci meningitis a year," says Dr. Royce Johnson, chief of infectious diseases at Bakersfield's Kern Medical Center. "Not long ago, I saw three new cases in one day." Johnson is now treating 51 cases of cocci meningitis and an additional 300 patients with severe valley fever...
What were the criteria of victory? All was explained on a yellowed sheet of parchment locked within the judges' envelope. Had contestants noted, for example, that "Chocolates," "Elsie," "Parietals," and "Joust" were grossly misspelled? Had they recognized that "Bacterium" is singular, whereas "Cocci" is plural...
Early penicillins were active mainly against the berry-shaped microbes or cocci, such as streptococci, staphylococci and pneumococci. But they were ineffective against most rod-shaped bacteria. And most of them had two other draw backs: they were so quickly destroyed by digestive acids that they had to be injected directly into the bloodstream, and they were destroyed by the enzyme penicillinase. which is produced by resistant strains of staphylococci...
...assorted protein molecules? Dr. Fox does not think this is difficult; he has done something very like it himself. He dissolved in hot water some of the proteinoids that he made by heating amino acids. When he cooled the solution, billions of microspheres appeared, about the size of cocci (round bacteria) and looking very much like them. They shrink when salt is added, and this suggests that they are hollow and that their walls are slightly permeable like the cell walls of bacteria...
When Dr. Fox dissolved his semi-proteins in hot water and let the solution cool, billions of microscopic spheres separated out of each gram. The spheres were about the same size as cocci (primitive bacteria), and they seemed to be sheathed with thin membranes much as bacterial cells are. Dr. Fox does not claim that his spheres are "alive," but he thinks his experiment demonstrates one possible means by which nonliving chemicals in the earth's primitive ocean may have been gathered together into cell-like units of life...