Word: paramecium
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Cancer researchers have looked long for a specific poison secreted by cancer cells. If such a substance could be detected in a cancer patient's blood, early diagnosis should be easy. Roskin started by testing the effect of serum from cancerous mice on the sensitive paramecium, a single-celled protozoan.* The serum had no effect. But when it was inactivated by freezing, and then mixed in carefully measured proportions with healthy guinea-pig serum, the mixture developed a toxic factor which killed paramecia...
...Cancer's estimated annual worldwide toll: 1,000,000. *The paramecium, a slipper-shaped animalcule less than 1/125 of an inch long, comes in eight sexes, multiples by dividing itself in two, lives in lily ponds, goldfish bowls, is sometimes found in drinking water...
...Among those not present was U.C.L.A.'s Geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings (TIME, Feb. 5), who turned down an invitation because he was too busy propagating new types of paramecium...
Infinitesimal Incest. These paramecium clones, which consist of the divisions and redivisions of one exconjugant (mated cell), are roughly comparable to the aggregate of cells in a multicellular animal like man. But, unlike the very different but interdependent cells in a human body, the cells in a clone are both identical and independent; they must struggle with each other to survive...
...Jennings' experiments in infinitesimal incest have yielded valuable hints on the effects of human inbreeding. Last summer they also led the scientist to a surprising discovery. In his efforts to mate various cells of one variety of paramecium, he discovered evidence that the paramecia are divided into no less than eight sexes. Unable to determine the physiological differences between them, he has found proof that each sex will mate cheerfully with any one of the other seven, but rigidly eschews homosexuality...