Word: karlson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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German Chemists Peter Karlson and Adolf Butenandt of the University of Munich collected three tons of silkworm pupae, ground up the little animals, then carefully processed the mess to extract 100 milligrams (one three-hundredth of an ounce) of a hormone called ecdysone. They knew ecdysone played a large part in the silkworm's life cycle, and when they discovered that it was remarkably similar to human sex hormones, they were fascinated. But what, if anything, did it have to do with DNA's genetic code...
...Karlson dipped into his tiny supply of pure ecdysone and sent a five-milligram test sample to Ulrich Clever, a young biochemist at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen. Clever had been investigating the appearance of puffy swellings on microscopic, DNA-carrying chromosomes in the salivary glands of fly larvae. The puffs appear just before the larvae mature and change into pupae, and the tiny swelling seems to cause the metamorphosis. Karlson wondered how ecdysone would affect that transformation...
...this one phenomenon Karlson has built a sweeping theory of how DNA controls the development of an organism, and how nature reads its own code. The great store of hereditary information that DNA contains, says Karlson, is not needed all at once. It comes into play gradually, as if it were being looked up, item by item, in a book of instructions. When the time comes for a larva to turn into a pupa, ecdysone secreted by its glands circulates among the cells and comes in contact with the long, ropelike molecules of the DNA in the chromosomes. The hormone...
...conceived, the story has dramatic force and psychological acuity. As realized, the film shows a distressing tendency to candy its corpses, and the climax is a mere placebo. Hayes's scene writing is often crude, and Phil (The Secret Way) Karlson's direction is sometimes downright amateur. He repeatedly misplaces his camera and clumsily misdirects his actors. He cannot rattle Actor March, who after a career of 33 years and 65 films stands almost without rival as a creative cinemactor. But the director thoroughly demoralizes Actor Gazzara-at best a humorless performer, he seems in this role...
...whiplashed, stomped on and strapped to chairs in a steamy cell of the impregnable Szarhaza prison. Their efforts to fight off insanity from mind-obliterating drugs are compellingly chronicled. Their subsequent prison break is skillful skulduggery, handled in the finest tradition of cinema suspense. Director Phil (Hell to Eternity) Karlson and Star-Producer Widmark have managed to take a script that is awash in cliches, plunge it into an authentic setting, surround it with sound historical and technical data, and photograph it with an admirable tightness and edgy excitement...