Word: commonness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Common Pursuit depicts five mismatched undergraduates at Cambridge (the British playwright's alma mater) who become intimates while putting out a literary magazine. Most of the story is their post-Cambridge life: two remain in academe, two share a publishing house and a paramour (Judy Geeson), and the most buffoonish (Nathan Lane) achieves the biggest success as a celebrity journalist. Theirs is not a "group" of friends but a crisscross of relationships, some close, some almost hostile despite a depth of mutual insight. They judge each other not by material attainments but by how closely each has clung...
...talk so gracefully or inhabit a world in which verbal violence is commonplace and bursts of physical violence so shocking. But in its evocation of the judgmental and forgiving ways of friendship -- of how a long acquaintance enables people to divine and condone each other's darkest secrets -- The Common Pursuit does indeed portray what is common in all humanity...
...addition to causing AIDS and flu, viruses have brought the scourges of smallpox, yellow fever and polio. They bear responsibility for many of the familiar rashes of youth -- chicken pox, measles, rubella -- as well as such disparate disorders as the common cold, gastroenteritis, herpes, shingles, warts and mononucleosis. Viruses are known to cause at least one form of human cancer and are prime suspects in several other kinds of malignancies. Just last week Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., announced that he and his team had isolated a new virus that may cause certain kinds...
Some viruses, like the ones that cause the common cold, look vaguely like soccer balls: round with a surface of bumpy triangular facets. Others, particularly the larger bacteriophages, resemble lunar landing modules. The flu virus looks like the head of a Roman mace, with spikes protruding in all directions; herpes viruses are spherical, as is the AIDS variety. Whatever their shape, all viruses have something in common. They are models of biological minimalism, consisting simply of a core of genetic material -- either a DNA or RNA molecule -- and a protective envelope made of proteins (most varieties have a double coat...
...less to the virus than to the vigorous activity of the immune system. However, once the body has created a population of antibody-producing B cells designed to combat a specific virus, immunity to that virus often lasts for decades, or even a lifetime. Then why does the common cold return again and again? One reason, scientists explain, is that colds can be caused by any one of hundreds of strains of bugs, most of them belonging to a group called the rhinovirus. A new cold can be brought on by a strain the immune system has not previously encountered...