Word: proteins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...immensely efficient agent taking over a captured industry. It seems to know where the production schedules and blueprints are-and it throws them away. In their place, it issues orders for the production of nothing but hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, plus an equal number of protein coats to fit. The cell-factory rushes to fill the massive order. It becomes strewn with waste materials. The strain tells. About the time the cell fills the invader's order and completes a myriad new molecules of nucleic acid, it falls into irreparable ruin. And just in time...
...Vaccination Mechanism. The most practical results so far of virological research are vaccines, and vaccines depend on the basic concept of viral structure as a nucleic-acid core with a protein overcoat. The coat is a foreign substance to the body it invades, and in the higher animals, including man, the system fights back by making antibodies that gang up on a virus particle, surround it and neutralize it. Unhappily, it takes days or weeks for the body to mobilize its antibody police, so the first viral invasion is likely to succeed and make the invaded victim sick...
...partial explanation may lie in the ability of new "provirus" particles to remain undetected in cells, doing no evident damage until they are stimulated by chemicals or X rays. The important thing is that these nucleic-acid molecules can be infective by themselves, with no assist from the protein that normally accompanies them in the whole virus. Dr. Frank L. Horsfall, director of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, the world's biggest private cancer research organization, sums it up: "We can now speak of infectious molecules in animal as well as plant diseases-something that was inconceivable only...
...that in some unpredictable cases, a molecule of viral nucleic acid, without its protein overcoat, so closely resembles a gene that it can slip into the cell's chromosomal lineup, displacing a normal gene, and make the cell reproduce abnormally. Most of the resulting abnormal cells would probably die, but a few might retain the power to run wild and perpetuate themselves as cancer...
Encephalitis (arborvirus-caused brain inflammation, more prevalent in Asia and Europe than in U.S.). Vaccines to date have been unsatisfactory or actually dangerous for man. Work is in progress on virus found in Malayan rodents in hopes that its protein overcoat will prove to be of a basic pattern that will trigger formation of antibodies against several close-kin viruses...