Word: hexed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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TIME'S Sept. 5 issue with New York's go-go Mets on its cover was hardly off the presses before the letters started pouring in. "I winced," groaned one New Yorker. "A TIME cover has so often been a hex. Let's hope the Mets survive your curse." Chuckled a Chicagoan, whose Cubs were then still in first place: "Many thanks for the 'kiss of death' cover story on the Mets." Shortly thereafter, the Mets swept a three-game series with the Cubs, and the rest is glorious history. Cartoonist Willard Mullin, who drew...
...brain cells and block normal activity. Earlier researchers suspected that the missing enzyme was hexosaminidase. Yet substantial amounts of hexosaminidase are found in Tay-Sachs victims. Neuroscientists John O'Brien and Shintaro Okada investigated hexosaminidase more intensively and discovered that it actually consisted of two enzymes, Hex-A and Hex-B. Both are present in normal tissue but, they found, only Hex-B occurs in the tissue of Tay-Sachs victims. So, they concluded, it is the absence of Hex-A that prevents the metabolism of fats in brain cells, and this results in the fatal disease...
...Four Risk. A single defective Tay-Sachs gene cannot afflict its carrier with the disease. The paired, normal gene orders the production of enough Hex-A to allow the necessary brain-cell metabolism. But if both parents carry a Tay-Sachs gene, there is a one-in-four risk that the baby will receive two abnormal genes-one from each parent-and succumb to the disease. If he receives only one, his body will produce less Hex-A than it should, but he will be able to lead a normal life. Like his parents, of course, he will...
...identification of Hex-A will enable doctors to detect both the carriers and victims of Tay-Sachs disease. If blood tests reveal that both a man and his wife have less than normal amounts of Hex-A and are thus carriers of Tay-Sachs genes, they can be warned of their 25% risk of producing a Tay-Sachs child and perhaps be discouraged from having children of their own. By inserting a needle through a woman's abdomen when she is 16 weeks pregnant and extracting fluid from the amniotic sac, doctors can determine if the unborn child will...
...Hex...