Word: poisons
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Since then, "guided and directed mutation with precisely predictable features" has produced bacteria that mutate after infection with viruses. Formerly harmless strains of diphtheria bacilli will, after viral infection, secrete the poison of virulent diphtheria. Because the bacterial lines breed true, said Dr. Horsfall, both these are cases of "infective heredity" induced by environmental factors...
...Martinus Beijerinck (1851-1931), who found that whatever caused mosaic disease in tobacco plants could slip through the minute pores of these filters. In 1897 he concluded that this infectious, filter-passing fluid was a "filterable virus." The word virus had been loosely used for centuries to denote any "poison" that caused infectious disease...
...youngster in Tennessee, Robinson felt racial discrimination very strongly. "I spent the first 18 years of my life trying to figure out a way to poison the water supply," he said...
This slender volume-in which Poet Lowell assembles his imitations of 66 "important poems" by 18 poets (from Homer to Pasternak) in five languages (Greek, German, French, Italian, Russian)-suggests that, in Lowell's case at least, one man's muse is another man's poison. About half of the poems still show the smudge of translation; about half read like English originals composed by a talented foreigner. But a few of them roil and hiss with the vigor and brilliance that makes Lowell, at 44, one of America's major minor poets...
...Exiled in Havana in 1951, he was attacked on the street by a man who attempted to jab poison into Betancourt's left arm with a hypodermic needle...