Word: poisons
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...used by some dermatologists as late as 1940 to make a patient's hair fall out-which made it easier to treat ringworm of the scalp. After such treatment hundreds of patients became ill, and scores died. Thallium salts were shunted from the medicine cabinet to the poison shelf. In 1957, the Texas legislature cut the allowable dose of thallium sulfate in a rat-poison mixture from 3% to 1%; the U.S. Department of Agriculture did the same in 1960. But even the weaker mixture is dangerous: it takes only half an ounce of chemically adulterated cookies to kill...
...easiest way to obtain bee venom is to get stung. But the method is plainly neither pleasant nor practical. Scientists anxious to gather the poison usually settle for a more cautious approach. They collect live insects, grab them one at a time with a pair of tweezers, then deftly slice out the venom sac; or else they persuade the stinging insects to discharge their poison through a rubber membrane...
Either system is wasteful: the bees are destroyed. But now. Dr. Rod O'Connor and a team of Montana State College chemists have developed a bee-milking method that allows not only the captured bees but wasps and hornets to produce their poison over and over again in sufficient quantities for research. A whole container of bees is anesthetized with a whiff of carbon monoxide, and then, one at a time, the insects are wrapped in a sash of aluminum foil that is connected to a source of high-voltage, low-current electricity. A brief shock causes the stinging...
...their milking system can cut collecting expeditions to a minimum, the Montana chemists look forward to the day when that part of their job may be done away with completely. Now that there is a better way of collecting venom, scientists even hope to learn how to synthesize the poison in the laboratory...
Smith referred to "excessive loneliness" as the "most virulent poison invented by industrial society," and pointed out that the primary task of young adulthood is to "develop the capacity nor intimacy...