Word: fragmenting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...beta amyloid--a generic name for a class of sticky proteins--from the brains of Alzheimer's patients. A short time later, four research teams zeroed in on the gene that encodes the recipe for making the protein. To their great surprise, they discovered that beta amyloid was a fragment of a much larger protein, which came to be known as the amyloid-precursor protein, or APP for short...
...Hospital Medical School screened the DNA of an Alzheimer's family and found what every geneticist in the field had been furiously looking for. The mutant APP gene sat on chromosome 21, and the single change in its DNA sequence occurred in the vicinity of the beta-amyloid fragment...
Then, last year, the Amyloid People staged a surprise attack. First, researchers at Elan Pharmaceuticals of South San Francisco stunned their colleagues by reporting that they had taken mice genetically engineered to develop plaques and vaccinated them with a fragment of beta amyloid. Twelve months later, seven out of nine mice remained plaque free. Then the Elan team vaccinated year-old mice whose brains were riddled with plaques. Result: the plaques started to melt away. Elan quickly drew up plans to test the vaccine in humans...
...guilt of the defendants. And despite the prosecution's 1,100 witnesses, the defense plans to implicate other terrorist groups. A recantation from one of the prosecution's witnesses could hurt. When an FBI agent in 1990 showed Edwin Bollier, a Swiss electronics maker, photos of a fingernail-size fragment found in the Scottish woods six months after Pan Am 103 went down, Bollier said it could have come from timers he had made for the Libyan army. But he now tells TIME that after finally seeing the actual fragment, he believes it is not the same piece that...
...course, such predictions are based on the assumption that current conditions will prevail into the foreseeable future, and it is quite possible that this assumption is wrong. Anything that would serve to fragment the current huge human population might help re-establish the conditions necessary for future human change. Unfortunately, we would undoubtedly perceive such an event as a terrible disaster, since it would necessarily entail the disappearance of billions of human beings...