Word: massed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reach deep into the crowd to make the touch, an image that in my mind has some cartoonist's kinship to Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Lyndon Johnson pressed flesh with the same gluttonous physicality, wading into the human surf, clawing and pawing into the democratic mass with an appetite amazing, alarming...
...injuries. Even a year ago, such a sweeping claim might have been dismissed as nonsense. But that was before last fall's discovery that the fetal human brain contains master cells (called neural stem cells) that can grow into any kind of brain cell. Snyder extracted these cells and "mass-produced" them in the lab. His hope is that the cells, when injected into a damaged adult brain, will turn themselves into replacements for cells that are dead or diseased...
...different brand of havoc. Some mutations spur rapid growth; others prod nearby blood vessels into sprouting new capillaries; still others send cancer cells out into the bloodstream, where they can seed new tumors. Within 10 years, predicts Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., "we will analyze the mutant genes and then tailor-make a treatment [for] that particular tumor...
Meat, it seems, is not just food but reward as well. But in the coming century, that will change. Much as we have awakened to the full economic and social costs of cigarettes, we will find we can no longer subsidize or ignore the costs of mass-producing cattle, poultry, pigs, sheep and fish to feed our growing population. These costs include hugely inefficient use of freshwater and land, heavy pollution from livestock feces, rising rates of heart disease and other degenerative illnesses, and spreading destruction of the forests on which much of our planet's life depends...
Unfortunately, this isn't just a matter of productive capacity. Mass production of meat has also become a staggering source of pollution. Maybe cow pies were once just a pastoral joke, but in recent years livestock waste has been implicated in massive fish kills and outbreaks of such diseases as pfiesteria, which causes memory loss, confusion and acute skin burning in people exposed to contaminated water. In the U.S., livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do. Just one hog farm in Utah, for example, produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. These megafarms...