Word: mosaicism
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...enlarged image of minute particles through the use of a beam of electrons. Working from electron-micrograph prints, Artist Bernard Safran enlarged the viruses somewhat more to obtain the proper effect for the cover. Among those he chose to use, the sticklike viruses at upper left are the tobacco mosaic virus, which figured importantly in early virological discoveries made in the 19th century; the smaller, pellet-shaped viruses at the upper right are polio; the four at the lower right are influenza...
...Pasteur and his early followers were big enough to be trapped in fine porcelain filters, devised by Pasteur's assistant Charles Chamberland, and to be seen under the 19th century light microscope. It was a temperamental Dutch botanist, Martinus Beijerinck (1851-1931), who found that whatever caused mosaic disease in tobacco plants could slip through the minute pores of these filters. In 1897 he concluded that this infectious, filter-passing fluid was a "filterable virus." The word virus had been loosely used for centuries to denote any "poison" that caused infectious disease...
...which beams of electrons are focused sharply enough to take photographs of objects less than a millionth of an inch across. This made many virus particles visualizable-and another Rockefeller fellow had something to visualize. Indiana-born Wendell Stanley went back to Beijerinck's favorite, the tobacco mosaic virus, or TMV, and spent years in a Princeton laboratory cooking down a ton of sickly tobacco leaves, filtering and re-filtering, dissolving and redissolving, until he had isolated the cause of this economically costly disease. What he had to show for years of imaginative perseverance was about a teaspoonful...
...work belongs to the great body of literature which says that life is cruel, beautiful and impossible to explain. He wrote on large blue postcards and is said to have cut out the sentences that pleased him, then assembled them into paragraphs, like a Byzantine artist constructing a mosaic...
...archaeologists found another brightly colored mosaic-floor in one small room of a Roman villa of the 4th century A.D. "The cleverly interwoven pattern of the mosaic," Hanfmann said, "suggests the highly sophisticated ornamental sense of late Roman interior decorators," To command a view of Sardis, the villa was built high on a cliff above the torrent Pactolus, which once brought gold to the ancient Lydians...