Word: meryman
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...Meryman's office now looks like a wildlife refuge. A red fox poses hungrily on a bookcase. A black crow, wings outstretched, sits on a windowsill. Brightly colored small birds perch on pencil tops, and a brown bat swings malevolently from the ceiling, suspended by a nearly invisible wire. All look amazingly lifelike, preserved by Meryman's "freeze-dry" process and apparently able to stay in good condition indefinitely. The fox was shot by Meryman when it invaded his hen house. "He accounted for 27 hens," says Meryman, "before I freeze-dried him." The other specimens were collected...
Responsible for the method is Dr. Harold T. Meryman of the Naval Medical Research Institute at Bethesda, Md., who stumbled onto the new-type taxidermy after a peanut butter-baited mousetrap at his home snared an unsuspecting cardinal. "I felt so bad about it," says Meryman, "that I decided I ought to give the bird a place in posterity." No taxidermist. Biophysicist Meryman, 39, tried an experiment. Posing the cardinal carefully, he first froze its joints into position with liquid nitrogen, then popped the bird into his kitchen freezer. When the moisture in the bird's body had turned...
...freeze-dry technique is not new; it has commonly been used to preserve water-soluble drugs and blood plasma. But Meryman was first to apply it to taxidermy, and he has accumulated abundant data on the drying time of various animals. Small insects take only 24 hours to freeze-dry. A garter snake needs eight days, and a red squirrel requires four to six weeks in the vacuum chamber. From the scientist's point of view, freeze-drying has one big advantage over standard commercial taxidermy: the animals' internal organs remain intact, can be reconstituted for study...
HAROLD T. MERYMAN, M.D. Sloane Physics Laboratory Yale University New Haven, Conn...
...related experiment, Dr. Harold Thayer Meryman has frozen his own blood. First he took the precaution of drawing some of it from his body. Then he sprayed it with liquid nitrogen. This froze it. Dr. Meryman promptly thawed it, tagged it with radioactive chromium, then had it transfused back into his body. Object: to see whether the frozen blood would deteriorate faster than normal. A radiation counter, timing the clicks that Dr. Meryman set off, showed no difference in the rate of blood-cell destruction. Whole blood, now difficult to keep longer than three weeks, could be banked indefinitely after...