Word: functions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...living cells didn't have a fondness for sticking together, we would all be colorful gobs of jelly oozing all over the floor. Fortunately, cells hold to a basic biological premise that stickiness is desirable for form and essential for function. They violate this premise at our peril. When cells become either too sticky or too slippery, arteries can get clogged, cancer cells can skate around the body, and inflammation can turn subversive. Researchers have long believed that if they could somehow manipulate stickiness, they would have a formidable new set of tools for healing...
Stickiness is central to almost all biological processes. Cells are able to form organs and function as a unit thanks to a fascinating category of complex glues they secrete known as extracellular matrix. Securing cells in their matrix are Velcro-like patches called cellular-adhesion molecules (CAMs), which are present on every cell except red blood cells. These cellular glues not only hold things together but also play a vital role in growth, fetal development, repair of damaged tissue and elimination of noxious invaders...
...certain levels, the U.S. is a dangerously splintered and tribal country. America's historically indiscriminate embrace has depended on economic opportunity to make the whole enterprise (The Dream) function. Obviously, angers and abrasions deepen when many are competing for fewer jobs. In such an atmosphere, television acts often as a universalizing, mediating influence. It becomes a kind of third eye, however myopic on occasion, or however silly. By telling stories as it does (however skewed its critics, like Quayle, may think the stories are), television may militate against fanaticism and fantasies of revenge. The medium's demographic gyroscopes almost inevitably...
Jacob, unlike his parents and sister, rarely appears as more than a sketched figure. He seems not to have a life, but merely a function: to set off the family torment, so the author can take notes. Carolyn dutifully worries now and then about how the parents of the dead girl are feeling, but mostly the troubled family's misery is airless. The legal and psychological entanglement seems oddly phantasmagorical, lacking independent reality. As an expression of parental dread, of being trapped and unable to help one's children in a situation of vaguely defined horror, the fears are vivid...
...addition, he says he wants to foster a greater unity among graduate students by revamping the student government and extending Dudley House's function as the center for graduate life on campus...