Word: mutant
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Davison's mathematical mutant tends to support what many molecular biologists already suspect: that malignancy is apparently linked to aberrations in the RNA. The nature of the deadly change in RNA remains a puzzle-in part because scientists find the study of chemical reactions on the cellular level so enormously difficult and timeconsuming. But if suspect reactions could first be tested in a computer, using a mathematical substitute for the cell, molecular biologists could perhaps achieve in a few seconds what normally might take them months in the laboratory. Thus Davison's computerized cell may some day provide...
...bacterium Escherichia coli, which inhabits every human bowel, is present in normal excrement and is highly amenable to laboratory manipulation. Its natural form is dangerous only when it runs rampant in an accidental or surgical wound or in organs other than the gastrointestinal tract. But a laboratory mutant might cause a plague of infectious disease resistant to available antibiotics. Altered DNA can be dynamite...
...what even a good marriage does to women. Are there any alternatives? Kate wonders. Probably not, Doris Lessing decides, at least for those women who seem to be born (as well as ingrained) with a sense of caring. Kate is intrigued and provoked, though, by a neighbor -either a mutant monster or the Woman of the Future-who seems to have no sense of responsibility and whose children still seem to have turned out well enough...
Over the past few months I have come increasingly to consider myself a modern successor to the late Charles Darwin. Both of us early in life came to weird places where by closely examining the mutant native fauna we began, I think, to unravel a few of those major questions life poses us. There are other parallels to explore: I have often been told I look like a beagle. While it seems self-evident that the city of Cambridge is a Galapagos for humans, I am still left with the word "Archipelago." Until I find a dictionary that defines Archipelago...
ANOTHER disease which can be identified easily is Down's Syndrome, or Mongolism. A baby with Down's Syndrome generally has not a mutant gene, but an extra one, attached to the normal twenty-first chromosome pair. Procedures are under study which would enable doctors to determine accurately the presence of Tay-Sachs disease--a disease which causes blindness, severe retardation, and early death. This disease is common among Jews of northern European origin. Sickle-cell anemia is another race-linked genetic defect that could be identified and eliminated by the application of new techniques...