Word: mao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They were right. Iproniazid is what is known as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAO). In the brain, scientists have subsequently learned, monoamine oxidase's job is to destroy leftover neurotransmitters that are floating around loose after they have done their work. By inhibiting the action of monoamine oxidase, drugs like iproniazid let neurotransmitters circulate and keep stimulating neurons longer than they normally would. An extended soaking in serotonin and norepinephrine evidently made for a happier patient, and MAO inhibitors became the first antidepressants...
...imipramine, first of the so-called tricyclic antidepressants. At the time no one had any idea why these medicines worked. Researchers have since learned that they keep excess serotonin and other neurotransmitters from being reabsorbed into the nerve cells they originally came from: same extended neurotransmitter bath as the MAO inhibitors, different mechanism...
...serotonin trail led scientists down a number of other interesting paths as well. One involved LSD: clinicians discovered that people on MAO inhibitors were much less sensitive to the drug than normal. The consensus is that LSD mimics serotonin in the brain and latches onto the same neuronal receptors. With MAO inhibitors keeping more serotonin in circulation, the acid cannot elbow...
...leather-bound volumes printed in acid-free ink and stored in the glass cases at Bob Slate's. Worshipped like prayer books and handled like the latest edition of Playboy to hit the men's locker room, complex planners are as common among students as red books in Mao's China...
...presenting the new program, Jiang, 71, was careful to pay rhetorical obeisance to Mao Zedong and insist that the government would continue to "oppose bourgeois liberalization." He never uttered the politically incorrect word privatize, explaining that the new shareholding system is simply a modern form of "public ownership" that "can be used both under capitalism and under socialism." But few were fooled by the verbal acrobatics. "It's a deep change," says Wang Shan, a political commentator in Beijing. "The industrial worker who used to rely on the state will be thrown into the marketplace...