Word: germ
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What did worry Moore was the paucity of information about the 20th Century's most potent germ destroyer. Though the molecular structure of the mold extract had been virtually solved, chemists were still unable to synthesize it. The discovery of four types hinted that there might be more. Recent research indicated that the very impurities which manufacturers had striven to eliminate might be responsible for some of the drug's efficacy. Why, no one knows. Could penicillin ultimately be broken into its component parts-each a remedy for a specific infection? Again, no one knows...
...till the 17th Century did Swammerdam show that in conception it was necessary for the male fluid to make contact with the female, a heresy that outraged certain authorities of his time who argued that fertilization by the male was not necessary; not till the 18th Century were male germ cells discovered; only within living memory has the fusion of male and female germ cells been demonstrated...
...changes spontaneously-and can be changed artificially. His key chapter has the thundering Marxian title "The Liquidation of the Conservatism of the Nature of Organisms." He explains that a plant variety often gets into a rut. Thus, it tries to produce descendants exactly like itself. But buried in its germ plasm are characteristics which have been suppressed because they did not benefit the plant in its accustomed environment. All that is needed to bring these buried characteristics to light is to "liquidate the plant's conservatism...
...Need to end undiluted national sovereignty: "Within the confines of each particular nation, as much as in the whole family of peoples, state totalitarianism is incompatible with a true and healthy democracy. Like a dangerous germ it infects the community of nations and renders it incapable of guaranteeing the security of individual peoples. It constitutes a continual menace...
...from coal tar, is claimed by its British discoverers to be a better malaria attack preventive than atabrine. Quinine and atabrine merely prevent parasites already in the blood from making the victim sick. Paludrine may occasionally even prevent malaria from getting into the blood at all, by killing the germ at the moment the mosquito pushes it through the skin...