Word: schwerdt
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Stanford Chemists Hubert S. Loring and C. E. Schwerdt had pondered a strange puzzle. Like other polio virus hunters, they had ground up and sifted the brains and spinal cords of nobody knows how many infected rats and monkeys. They had prepared virulent extracts, capable of transmitting the disease. But when they refined their material further, its virulence somehow disappeared...
...refining process kill the virus? Loring and Schwerdt thought lowering the temperature might keep the virus alive. As part of a long process, they made an extract from the brains and spinal cords of polio-infected cotton rats, froze it. Then, letting it start to thaw, they whirled their material in an ultra-high-speed centrifuge (60,000 revolutions per minute) to separate its protein, and with chemicals refined the protein further. Eventually they isolated a particle less than two-billionths of an inch in diameter. The protein particle proved to be 80 to 95% pure virus; a billionth...