Word: oxygenate
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Woodward's process, consisting of 30 steps, begins with ortho toluidine and ends with a compound close to cortisone. A process recently completed by Louis F. Fieser, Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry, and Hans Heymann, research fellow in Chemistry, takes four steps and adds a vital oxygen atom to the molecule...
...this way. Syntex Inc. of Mexico City, for example, has been making sex hormones (testosterone, progesterone, etc.) out of an inedible wild yam called cabeza de negro, which yields a substance containing the four-ringed steroid nucleus. But cortisone is tougher. For one thing, its molecule has an oxygen atom attached to one of its carbon atoms (No. 11), and to place that oxygen in the correct spot is a difficult chemical trick...
...cortisone. Perhaps even more promising is another aspect of the Syntex accomplishment. The steroid hormones are, in effect, "code words" which help to control the cells of the body. They are all very similar, built around the same nucleus, but the slightest difference (such as the shift of an oxygen atom from one carbon atom to another) changes their effect. Medical researchers would like to try hundreds of steroids to see what each can do to make the body work properly...
Long before the transports arrive, the frogmen mine the concrete and steel traps with lung-bursting patience, blast them out of the path of the assault troops. Donning rubber suits and shoulder-fitted oxygen tanks, they give the picture its most gripping sequence by slipping through the steel net of a Japanese harbor to mine its submarine pens. For good measure, the movie tosses in a tense situation aboard the frogmen's destroyer (commanded by Gary Merrill), when Widmark and Andrews undertake the ticklish job of disarming an unexploded Japanese torpedo that has pierced the ship's hull...
Testing the shells for oxygen isotopes will take a long time. But when the job is done, Urey hopes to know whether a change of climate, or some other disaster, wiped out the mighty dinosaurs...