Word: harmlessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seed. The maker of one of the world's most popular herbicides, Monsanto has created crops that are resistant to the toxin. With it, farmers can spray away weeds without spraying away their harvest. The company has also developed plants with a built-in toxin that is harmless to humans but lethal to insects. If farmers in the developing world use these muscled-up crops--even with Terminator genes--their harvests might increase enough to cover the cost of buying seeds each spring. Says Delta and Pine Land vice president Harry Collins: "It will help them become more production-oriented...
Intellectuals love baseball, and they read sweet meanings into it. The game "has a mythic quality," Bernard Malamud thought--the myths being innocent democracy, recovered childhood, a harmless, universal cast of heroes (from Ruth and DiMaggio long ago to McGwire and Sosa in last year's memorable season) and a sentimental reconciliation, over peanuts and Crackerjacks, between the college-educated and the working...
...discovered early on, is to take advantage of the infectious power of viruses; burrowing into cells is second nature to them. A virus is nothing more than a tiny strip of DNA or RNA crammed into a protein envelope. Using the tools of molecular biology, scientists render the virus harmless by deleting some or all of its genes, splicing the therapeutic gene into the remaining genetic material and, in a laboratory Petri dish, mixing it with human cells. The altered virus, now called a carrier or vector, can deliver the therapeutic gene into the nucleus with great dispatch...
...caused by feeding animal parts to cows, rather than by genetic meddling, the panic left consumers extremely wary about what goes onto the family dinner table. Herbert Krach of the Swiss Small Farmers Union notes, "For years scientists assured us that feeding animal-based feeds to cattle was harmless." But the cautions also owe something to romantic--and perhaps outdated--notions about agriculture. Says population geneticist Brian Johnson of Britain's conservation watchdog English Nature: "Conventional intensive agriculture has done more damage to wildlife than anything else." Anyone who thinks that pesticide spraying is safer than biotech crops, he says...
...researchers at the National Institutes of Health. In September 1990 a team led by Drs. W. French Anderson and R. Michael Blaese extracted T cells from Ashi and exposed them to mouse leukemia viruses into which human ADA genes had been spliced. The viruses, which the researchers had rendered harmless by removing all their genes, invaded the T cells and burrowed into their DNA, carrying the ADA gene with them. Finally, a billion or so of Ashi's T cells, many of them now outfitted with a functioning ADA gene, were dripped back into her veins. Four months later...