Word: salmons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When it leaves the ocean to swim up the rivers of the Northwest and spawn, the Pacific salmon is lithe and healthy. As little as two weeks later, it degenerates into an aged, colorless and almost lifeless fish. Its flesh wastes away, bones soften, and skin peels off. The secretion of mucous material that keeps scales healthy suddenly stops, and the fish falls prey to fungus infections. Tiny parasitic worms multiply and spread through the fish's body; some glands run wild, others cease functioning...
What causes this piscatorial version of The Picture of Dorian Gray? Now, after studying the salmon for six weeks during a Pacific voyage aboard the oceanographic ship Alpha Helix, 40 scientists and doctors have returned to the U.S. with some provocative insights into the aging process...
...Fuel. Aboard the Alpha Helix, Biochemist Eberhard Trams of the National Institutes of Health discovered that the brain's control of the pituitary gland was a major factor in the sudden aging of the salmon. As the fish enters fresh water, he found, the pituitary quickly grows to more than twice its normal size, and the central nervous system fails to maintain control. The gland then triggers a metabolic speedup that burns away practically all of the fat in the salmon's body. Biochemist Andrew Benson, associate director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explains...
...effect of the fresh water, says Benson, is to stimulate the production of a hormone that causes calcium to dissolve out of the bones. The bloodstream is thus supplied with calcium that is no longer available from the calcium carbonate in ocean water-but the cost is high. The salmon's bones soften and virtually dissolve...
...Mexicans were dazzling in white. There were green-gowned Nigerians and Australian girls in yellow dresses; the Americans wore red blazers and the Russians chose blue. The Japanese were decked out in uniforms of cerise and white, and there was a magnificent Mongolian flag-bearer in red loincloth, salmon cape, fur hat and leather knee boots...