Word: germ
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Pacemaker. Most biologists believe that the evolution of higher organisms works through genes-tiny little somethings (probably protein molecules) strung along the chromosomes in the germ plasm. Thousands of genes controlling various body characteristics have been traced in Drosophila melanogaster, the scientifically celebrated little fruit fly. It is by changes in these genes that evolution of different types of organisms takes place. But last week Dr. Millislav Demerec of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Genetics announced his opinion- based on careful research-that chromosomes contain one gene, which, by affecting all the genes, speeds up the rate...
...Germany this year a "super-microscope" of this sort was announced (TIME, June 6). In the issue of the British journal Nature which reached the U. S. last week was a picture taken by Professor L. C. Martin of London's Imperial College which showed a germ called Micrococcus flavus magnified 16,000 times. Last week in Richmond, Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin of RCA Manufacturing Co. showed fluorescent-screen projections, made with his electron microscope, of tungsten crystals in which the molecules themselves could be distinguished in the molecular structure...
Their importance to science is that they have a unique hereditary defect of the sort which crops out occasionally in nature but which human investigators cannot produce at will. Some disturbance in the rat chromosomes (heredity carriers in the germ plasm) prevents their soft, prenatal cartilage from developing into a normal skeleton. The young appear normal for two weeks, then become bandy-legged as if suffering from rickets. Usually they die at the age of four to five weeks, with soft, collapsed ribs and emphysema of the lungs (air leakage into the spaces of the connective tissue...
...caries are related. Backing their conclusions with a mass of laboratory detail gathered over a period of twelve years, they declared that the cause of caries was not candy but certain "fractions" of wheat, corn and oat products, that these ferment in the mouth, and are transformed by a germ-which they christened Streptococcus odontyliticus (tooth dissolver)- into an acid which attacks tooth enamel...
...inventing the luxury hotel, Ritz perforce had to pay attention to plumbing, and this led him to an interest in hygiene in general. At a time when even palaces stank with clogged drains, Ritz put in modern plumbing; in addition he threw out heavy, germ-catching furnishings, gave every room a southern exposure. Within a short time the Paris Ritz became known as the best sanatorium in Europe...