Word: silkworms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Grail which motivates this glowing silkworm's Quest from coast to coast appears to be some mystic sense of Nowness, which, once possessed, will be the journalistic scoop of an epoch. Mainland commitment is no good, because "the moment you become a partisan of any cause you commit yourself to ideas fifty years old, because that's how long it takes an idea to become a cause.... George Orwell said everything that needs to be said about the current international scene in 1948." Well, statements like this don't quite read as cleverly as they speak, and neither does...
German Chemists Peter Karlson and Adolf Butenandt of the University of Munich collected three tons of silkworm pupae, ground up the little animals, then carefully processed the mess to extract 100 milligrams (one three-hundredth of an ounce) of a hormone called ecdysone. They knew ecdysone played a large part in the silkworm's life cycle, and when they discovered that it was remarkably similar to human sex hormones, they were fascinated. But what, if anything, did it have to do with DNA's genetic code...
...Astaurov has spent 30 years on his research. He began by working out dependable ways to make silkworm eggs hatch into worms of the desired sex. Female worms are comparatively easy to produce: Astaurov's most dependable system is to wash unfertilized eggs and dunk them for 18 minutes in water heated to 115° F. This heat shock makes the eggs start developing as if they had been fertilized, and since they contain no male contribution, they all produce females like their mothers...
...cocoons of male silkworms yield almost one-third more silk than those of females, so Dr. Astaurov concentrated next on making silkworm eggs hatch into males. His most successful technique is to expose unfertilized eggs to X rays. This rough treatment kills the delicate female genetic material but does no apparent harm to other parts of the eggs. Then Dr. Astaurov fertilizes the eggs with male sperm that has not been irradiated. When the embryos develop, they are free of female influence; they all grow into high-yield male silkworms...
Guinness itself is a superlative, the world's greatest grab bag of mosts, leasts, longests, shortests, fattests, thinnests, highests, lowests, fastests and slowests-20,000 records in all. Its students can learn that the creature with the most sensitive sniffer is the male silkworm moth, which can detect a female two miles away; that the longest place name belongs to the New Zealand village of Taumatawhakatangihangakoauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu; and that Mrs. Beverly Nina Avery, a Los Angeles barmaid, holds the record for most spouses in a monogamous society, with 14 husbands, five of whom, she once alleged, broke her nose...