Word: fungi
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Just about everyone and, inevitably, his brother has had athlete's foot. The various fungi which masquerade under that name annually infect an estimated 40 million people in the U.S., 2,000,000 of them badly enough to send them sprinting to a doctor. But until recently, doctors could recommend little more than the various medications available without prescription on drugstore counters. And those assorted fungistatics (fungus retarders), whether liquid, powder or ointment, often did no better than...
Camembert & Wine. Plantlike, but not quite plants, fungi are rootless and leafless, consist of tiny threads (hyphae) tangled in a mass (mycelium) that can grow as much as half a mile in 24 hours. Lacking chlorophyll, fungi cannot make their own food, batten instead on fabric, fur, fat, paint, plants, plastics, skeletons, cold cream, jet fuel and people. One species can survive only on the left hind leg of a water beetle. Most fungi reproduce by the sexual union of two different spores, sometimes drop hundreds 'of millions of spores in three or four days. Most of them...
...benefits to man are countless. The fragile inky cap is delicious if gathered young and cooked promptly. Lichen, formed by the union of fungi and algae, eats into rock, prepares it to become new soil. The molds that make Camembert are fungi; so are the yeasts that leaven bread and ferment grapes, grains, berries, cacti, honey and camel's milk into alcohol. Yeasts keep industry in ferment as well, assist in the manufacture of paint remover, antifreeze, synthetic rubber, adhesives, cosmetics and perfume. Yeast-feeding produces better pelts in mink, more honey from bees, faster growth in trout...
Benefit & Bane. Even more dramatic are the contributions fungi have made to science and medicine. Yeasts' high content of vitamins makes them effective against beriberi and pellagra. Ergot, derived from fungus-infected grain, speeds labor in childbirth, helps control bleeding. A common red bread mold has vastly facilitated research on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which governs heredity and holds the secret of life...
...that time she also became passionately convinced that chemicals, in her words, "are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of life." Dramatically, she pictured a time when the sprays, dusts and aerosols used to control insects, fungi and other foes of plant life would "still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams," finally bringing on the silent spring of her title...