Word: cowing
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...comes what may eventually be a simpler and cheaper solution. In the British medical journal Lancet, Pediatrician Tetsuro Fujiwara reports successfully using a strange concoction to coat the lungs of 15 newborns with HMD who were not responding to standard therapy. The ingredients: purified surfactant taken from cow lungs and organic compounds. Others have tried a similar approach, using totally synthetic surfactants. But such solutions seemed not to work because they lacked some essence of the natural substance. Moreover, no one had yet devised a way to apply a surfactant directly to a baby's lungs...
Fujiwara, an associate professor at the Akita University School of Medicine in northern Japan, solved these problems in a sort of medical hat trick that is, as he puts it, "simplicity itself." Picking up cow lungs at local slaughterhouses, he scraped off their surfactant, rid it of most of its protein, modified it with the organic compounds, and put the resulting white powder into solution. That way, with a tube and syringe, he could propel it directly into an infant's air passages. To spread it over the lungs, he just moved his tiny patients about until the alveolar...
...using surfactant substitutes remain to be seen. They point out that scientists have not yet unraveled the chemical structure of natural surfactants and thus cannot tell if there is any significant difference between the human and animal variety. Fujiwara acknowledges that much testing remains to be done before the cow-lung concoction achieves widespread use. He plans a large-scale clinical trial of the substance this summer...
...Administration also seemed, to Economist Sprinkel, to be "playing fast and loose with the numbers" in the budget. Example: sharp cuts are proposed for such sacred cow items as aid to education, Medicare and Medicaid funding, and the Administration's long-stalled hospital-cost containment bill. But Congressmen are almost certain to go ahead and continue providing lavishly for those pet programs anyway...
...unsuccessful by turns, and although Comedian Carl Reiner is the director, the instinct here is to give most of both credit and blame to Martin. The basic idea is clever: Martin is cast as the loving, beloved adopted son of a family of black sharecroppers. He is dumb as cow-flop and hopeless at foot shufflin' and finger snappin', but he tries hard. When he is ready to go out into the big world and his black mother (Mabel King) tells him that he was adopted, he is horrified: "You mean I'm gonna stay this color...