Word: dombrowski
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ACLU suit, however, is based on a Supreme Court decision of April, 1965, (Dombrowski, vs. Pfister) in which the Court ruled that Louisiana anti-subversive laws had a "chilling effect" on free speech; thus the two who brought the suit were not even required to undergo prosecution because, the majority opinion asserted, trying them would infringe on their first amendment rights -- regardless of the verdict...
Elaborate Precautions. Dr. Dombrowski got interested in ancient life when he noted that the warm, allegedly curative brine that comes to the surface near his laboratory at Bad Nauheim was full of living bacteria. They could not originate in the soil, he decided, because they are present in the water when it is still 600 ft. below the surface. Besides, they were a type whose modern representatives live in the sea. And along with the bacteria, the brine carried fossil pollen from trees that grew in the Permian...
Geologists know that the Bad Nauheim brine gets its salt from the thick Kali and Zechstein deposits 40 miles away, so Dombrowski next looked for bacteria in the salt itself. Guarding carefully against contamination by modern bacteria, he dissolved samples of Zechstein salt in sterilized nutrient broth. After a few days, he examined the broth, found it to be teeming with lively bacteria...
Sure that his colleagues would still suspect that ordinary modern bacteria had worked their way into his broth, Dombrowski developed elaborate precautions to keep the invaders out (including germ-killing ultraviolet light, antiseptic solution, and gas flames), repeated a laborious process 180 times. In 86 cases the broth contained a culture of living bacteria which, Dombrowski is sure, could only have come from the ancient salt. Most of the bacteria were strains of Pseudomonas, whose nearest modern relatives live in the intensely salt water of the Dead...
...bacteriologists may still be skeptical. Bacteria can be enclosed in crystallized salt and stay alive. Only last week bacteria were reported that had lived in Antarctic ice for 44 years, since the Shackelton Expedition of 1917. But living in salt for 180 million years is an unheard-of feat. Dombrowski, nevertheless, has able supporters. Bacteriologist Georg Henneberg, head of Berlin's famed Robert Koch Institute, does not doubt that Dombrowski extracted living bacteria from the interior of solid blocks of Zechstein salt-though there is still a slim possibility that the salt was contaminated relatively recently by bacteria that...