Word: mammalian
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...reason, says Nemiroff, is a combination of coldness, which lowers the body's need for oxygen, and an old mammalian response known as the diving reflex. The reflex was studied in the 1930s in diving mammals, like the porpoise and seal, which can remain submerged without breathing for periods of 20 minutes or more. And, confirms Nemiroff, the same automatic response works in humans as well. Triggered by held breath and cold water on the face, the diving reflex slows the heartbeat and the flow of blood to the skin, muscles and other tissues that are relatively resistant...
...registration fee buys you a room in one of the pleasant residential Yale colleges, a consignment of psychoactive substances equivalent to the consciousness-altering contents of Thompson's kit bag as described in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (enough to remove the convolutions from all the mammalian grey matter in Wyoming), two commemorative stamps, the services of a lawyer who knows federal and Connecticut narcotics regulations like the back of his hand, and much, much more. In short, if you've got the cash, you can't afford...
...pneumococcus has been demonstrated in the animal body. Moreover, bacteria in the gut are constantly exposed to fragments of host DNA that are released as the cells lining the gut die, and bacteria growing in carcasses have a veritable feast of DNA. The efficiency of such uptake of mammalian DNA by bacteria is undoubtedly very low. However, because of the extraordinarily large scale of the exposure in nature, recombinants of this general class must have been formed innumerable times over millions of years. They have thus been tested in the crucible of natural selection, and if they had high survival...
...very large safety factor is added by the provision in the present Guidelines for biological containment. All work with mammalian DNA must be carried out only in an EK2 strain, which has a drastically impaired ability to multiply, or to transfer its plasmid, except under very special conditions provided in the laboratory...
...thus see that with a strain known to have added the gene for a potent toxin a serious laboratory infection requires the compounding of four low probabilities. With strains from shotgun experiments we have a fifth, very low probability, already mentioned: that an apparently harmless mammalian tissue will yield a dangerous product...