Word: proteins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the great Kariba Dam on the Zambesi River was finished in 1959, every prospect about it was pleasing. Besides generating 1,500,000 kilowatts of power, the dam would create a lake 175 miles long where protein-starved black Rhodesians could catch fish and white Rhodesians could swim and sail. But Kariba Lake had hardly begun to fill with water when a vicious enemy showed its deceptively pretty face. A delicate, floating water fern named Salvinia auriculata appeared in patches that spread with astonishing speed. By last week dense mats, some of them strong enough to support...
Stimulation, they found, resulted in a marked increase in the neurons' content of enzyme proteins, while the glial cells showed a corresponding drop. The glial cells behave like the self-sacrificing wife who eats mostly potatoes and gives the high-energy meat to her ditchdigger husband. The "information" contained in the protein which the neuron forms, reasons Hyden, becomes the impulse that the neuron sends along the filaments to other neighboring neurons...
...Modified Proteins. The higher brain functions of memory and reasoning, Hyden hypothesizes, are achieved by the way the neuron alters the protein it forms. Each neuron contains millions of molecules of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Each of these molecules is chemically keyed by the arrangement of its internal building blocks. These molecules dictate, in accordance with their keys, the nature of the proteins that the neuron forms, in cooperation with the glial cells. The modified proteins are the chemical representations of thoughts...
...pathetic Baluba tribesmen, hurled out of their homelands last year by the tribal fighting, huddled homeless and hungry in a harsh, inhospitable region where few crops grew. Now, unless massive help arrived soon, many of them faced death from sheer starvation. Nearly all the children suffered from the dread protein-deficiency disease called kwashiorkor, which shriveled limbs, swelled bellies and fouled the blood. Already, several thousand adults and children have died, and hundreds more are considered too far gone to save. The U.N.'s Food & Agriculture Organization pronounced it the world's worst famine since India...
When thus deposited, Keys says that cholesterol is mainly responsible for the arterial blockages that culminate in heart attacks. Explains Keys: As the fatty protein molecules travel in the bloodstream, they are deposited in the intima, or inner wall of a coronary artery. The proteins and fats are burned off, and the cholesterol is left behind. As cholesterol piles up, it narrows, irritates and damages the artery, encouraging formation of calcium deposits and slowing circulation. Eventually, says Keys, one of two things happens. A clot forms at the site, seals off the flow of blood to the heart and provokes...