Word: convert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dangerous organisms. But there is always the chance that something or someone will fail-and that a few virulent bugs will slip through the safeguards to multiply in the outside world. Faced with this problem at the Asilomar conference. Geneticist Roy Curtiss III proposed an ingenious solution: Why not convert the standard genetic research organism, a strain of the E. coli bacterium, into a seriously weakened mutant variety that would quickly self-destruct if it escaped the laboratory? Curtiss volunteered to engineer the new bug, and his colleagues agreed to hold off on many of their recombinant DNA experiments until...
Such is the underground Passover of the people traditionally known as Marranos (secret Jews), a word that originally meant pigs. They live not only in Belmonte but also in many other mountain towns in northern Portugal. Forced to convert to Christianity in the 15th century, they still follow Jewish customs that have been passed on by word of mouth across nearly five centuries. Though they have had virtually no contact with the rest of the world's Jews, many authentic prayers have survived in their ritual, alongside such Christian accretions as the Lord's Prayer...
Manuel's solution, ordered in 1497, , was to close the ports and force the Jews to be baptized or die. Thousands were ' herded into a Lisbon camp to face starvation and violence. Many committed suicide rather than convert; others were dragged by their hair or beards to the baptismal font. All Jewish children from ages two to ten were taken from their parents and placed in Catholic homes. Only after ten years were some Jews permitted to escape to Amsterdam or the Americas...
Died. William Stuart Nelson, 81, former dean of religion at Washington's Howard University and an early advocate, along with Martin Luther King Jr., of nonviolent protest to combat racial segregation; in Hyattsville, Md. A soft-spoken but self-assured Baptist minister. Nelson became a convert to the strategy of passive resistance after he met Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1946. In the early 1960s, he predicted that it would "reshape the entire structure of race relations...
Died. Elizabeth Ames, 99, longtime doyenne of Yaddo, one of the first U.S. artists' retreats; in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. A charming and commanding Minnesotan, she was enlisted to carry out the dream of Katrina Trask Peabody, to convert Yaddo, her 500-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, into a working haven for writers, musicians and artists. Mrs. Ames decreed that the 54-room Yaddo mansion must remain "a splendid private home, where a small 'house party' of friends may feel wholly at ease," and she ran it in that Jamesian way until 1969, keeping Yaddo short on rules...