Word: inert
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...many legislators, a sensible compomise was reached. Extremists crying "Human guinea pig!" had demanded that no doctor be allowed to give an investigational drug to a patient without telling him so. This would have made it impossible to compare the effects of a drug with those of an inert dummy (a placebo), as is now done in "double-blind" studies in which neither doctors nor patients know who is getting the active substance. So the law now says that doctors must tell patients what they are getting, "except where they deem it not feasible, or contrary to the best interests...
Summoned five years ago to the office of William C. Decker, then president of Corning Glass Works, Research Director William H. Armistead listened wide-eyed to a short but characteristically pithy discourse. "Glass is a very good material," mused Decker. "It's transparent, it's inert [non-corrosive]-but it breaks. Why don't you fix that?" Last week Corning announced that its scientists had come remarkably close to filling Decker's improbable order with a chemically strengthened glass called Chemcor. In a demonstration session at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, Corning executives bent, twisted...
...ways at Newport Shipyard undergoing final polishing, then was set in the water for minor ballast shifts. At week's end her crew arrived to pace out the dwindling days before the meeting with the Australian challenger Gretel. By contrast, the Australian 12-meter lay inert under the hurried tread of a dozen shipfitters who had come aboard for final, perhaps desperate, changes...
...Acting Secretary-General U Thant declared that his Congo commanders "have been told to be very much on the alert." The U.N. may or may not be able to accomplish it, but sooner or later, the preposterous, protracted Adoula-Tshombe deadlock will have to be broken. The inert Congo giant cannot be allowed to lie there indefinitely...
...notorious element in fallout that masquerades as calcium and lodges in human bones. But it is plentiful in the byproducts of plutonium manufacture, and the AEC's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, taking careful precautions, decided to use it. It was converted into strontium titanate, which is chemically inert and virtually insoluble, then formed into eleven pellets and welded into a three-layer jacket. All this had to be done by remote control from behind thick radiation shields-or the operators would not have lived to do more work...