Word: pneumococcus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only protection against pneumococcal pneumonia was serum prepared in animals. It was neither reliable nor safe. Then came the sulfas, and an intensified search for better medications for both prevention and treatment. Toward war's end, the armed forces developed a vaccine from a fraction of the pneumococcus microbe itself. But six different types were needed. And by then, penicillin was becoming available. It was a great pneumococcus killer. Doctors ignored the vaccines...
...prevent 10,000 or more such needlessly early deaths each year, said Dr. Austrian, is for everyone over 50 to be immunized with six-way pneumococcus vaccine. One shot gives good immunity which lasts for years. But before the prescription can be filled, patients and their physicians will have to create a demand for the vaccine. No pharmaceutical house manufactures it today, because there is no market for it. Mass produced, it should cost no more than $1.50 a shot...
...changes in the environment, and the mutant strains will breed true. It began, he recalled, with the little-recognized achievement of three Rockefeller Institute scientists, Drs. Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty in 1944. They showed that if nucleic acid from the genetic material of one strain of pneumococcus germs was stirred in with a batch of pneumococci of another strain, the second strain picked up the inherited traits of the first, and then, "in enduring continuity," bred true from cell to daughter cell. "The heritance of an acquired characteristic was no longer an unsupported theory," he said...