Word: human
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...against barbed wire, ruining their wool and revealing themselves as victims of scrapie. On North American fur farms, mink of many colors get sick with a sort of softening of the brain, while smoke-hued, so-called Aleutian mink get liver and kidney disease, with added symptoms suggestive of human arthritis. Each year, in the highlands of New Guinea, a hundred or more members of the Stone Age Fore tribe die of kuru, an incurable degeneration of the brain...
Gajdusek believes that slow-acting viruses may be to blame for no fewer than 30 human diseases of the nervous and muscular systems, some rare, some common. In the hope of explaining them -and thus, eventually, of curing or preventing them-he is weaving together all the seemingly disparate threads of disease in mink, sheep and men, and painstakingly amassing information for which earlier virologists would not wait...
That, Gajdusek says, may have been a mistake. Some of these delayed-fuse viruses may take years to exert their malign effects in small animals, and decades in long-lived Homo sapiens. Virologist Gajdusek, a human whirlwind who goes around the world half a dozen times a year, decided to become a model of patience. At the institute, he set up a long-range study program with a variety of animals, ranging from tree shrews to sheep and goats, a dozen species of monkeys, and a number of forbiddingly expensive chimpanzees...
...Parkinsonism. His patience paid off. From New Guinea, Gajdusek brought back parts of kuru victims' brains. He injected some of the material into chimpanzees, and waited-for two years. Then the chimps began to show the wobbly gait, slavering and eye-crossing that mark the human disease. When they died, their brains showed essentially the same type of damage as those of human kuru victims...
...made no mention of recent studies in its own laboratories in which a product of cyclamate metabolism, cyclohexylamine, causes breaks in the chromosomes of cells grown in the test tube. Injections cause similar damage to the chromosomes of rats. In terms of effects upon chromosomes in human beings-and therefore, upon future generations-no one knows just what this means. No matter how hard and fast the geneticists try to work, it may take years to find the answer...