Word: glycerin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When autumn temperatures fall toward the freezing point, wise motorists put antifreeze in their radiators. Many wise insects do much the same thing, reports Biochemist Fred Smith of the University of Minnesota. What's more, their antifreeze is glycerol (glycerin), a chemical that closely resembles the ethylene glycol that is the basis for many antifreeze brands...
...producer of unexceptional wines from a small hillside plot, but a vintner with a bright idea of how to make every year a vintage year. Hiring a chemist, he concocted a mixture of two parts grape juice, eight parts water, plus dashes of citric acid, tartaric acid, potash and glycerin. In two years Korn made between 1,500,000 and 4,000,000 quarts. Germans sipped it with satisfaction, noted nothing unusual; neither did the government controllers, who checked it periodically for bouquet and chemical content...
...such Graustarkian foolishness usually, though strangely, come when Graustark momentarily seems real. Olivier does the trick, facing Marilyn's gee-whiz antics on their carriage-borne way to Westminster Abbey, when he cracks the faintest smile in film history. Marilyn does not achieve it when she cracks a glycerin tear in supposedly stunned awe of the choir-thundering coronation sequence...
...outstanding importance was the news about red cells. There are 5,000,000 or more of these (each about one four-thousandths in. in diameter) in a cubic-millimeter droplet of blood. It has always been easy to separate them, and recently a method of freezing them in glycerin was perfected. The trick is to get them out of the giycerin undamaged, and that has taken hours of complex effort...
...success is a refinement of the late Edwin J. Cohn's fractionation machine, which used to fill a 32-ft. trailer (TIME, Oct. 23, 1950) and has now been squeezed down to the size of a dishwasher. This uncanny apparatus has been adapted and taught to wash the glycerin from the red cells without damaging them. With this machine, Dr. Tullis believes, the life of red cells can be extended well beyond two years. So far, only six of the new machines have been built, but as they become generally available, doctors who want red cells will be able...