Word: mold
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Others made machines that could fly and machines that could think, discovered a mold that conquered infections and a molecule that formed the basis of life. There were people who could inspire us with a phrase: fear itself, tears and sweat, ask not. Frighten us with a word: heil! Or revise the universe with an equation...
...start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth of the germs. His serendipitous discovery would eventually save more lives than were lost in all the century's wars combined...
...political philosophy. Kant should be an end in himself. One should not, and does not, have to locate his thinking on our political spectrum to make him interesting. But students in Justice are required to pluck Kant from the clouds, fumble with him in their untutored hands and mold him to a present-day problem--like smashing a butterfly between one's fingers in order to admire its wings. Such familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a false and dangerous sense of intimacy...
...when the powers that be pitted a triangle-chested, all-American black guy, "Night Stick" (very much in the NCO mold here), against "Yugoslavia," a balding, grubby, stringy-haired villain waving a Yugoslav flag, that cynical side pushed to the fore. Did that country need any more punishment, symbolic or otherwise? I thought not, and amid the thunderous "U-S-A" chants I found myself cackling uproariously - and even flashed a passable Serb salute for a few seconds before getting scared and holstering...
Finally, a few suggested that we put the thing into an object that the campus will hold as semi-sacred. This could be the base of the John Harvard statue, the tower of Memorial Hall or a metal mold resembling the Eudocimus albus (the North American ibis...