Word: smallpox
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...greater. Last week a group of scientists with the New York State department of health announced an exciting and imaginative application of the genetic-engineering techniques that are transforming modern medicine. Using the sophisticated new cut-and-paste methods of manipulating genes, the researchers were able to transform ordinary smallpox vaccine into vaccines that may be able to prevent the other three diseases. So far the results have been tested in animals only, but Virologist Enzo Paoletti, a senior scientist on the project, is confident that they will work in humans as well. What is more, Paoletti's Albany...
...starting point for the dramatic research is the oldest vaccine on earth: a smallpox prophylactic made from a live cowpox virus called vaccinia. It was developed two centuries ago by Edward Jenner, a British physician who had observed that milkmaids exposed to cowpox were immune to smallpox. Because vaccinia is an unusually large virus and because it has been familiar to scientists for so long, it was an ideal subject for genetic tinkering...
...effective. This does not mean that polio will be suddenly abolished. But it could mean that as vaccination becomes universal for children, whole generations will grow up free of the paralysis that has condemned so many to enfeebled limbs or iron lungs, eventually, polio can become as rare as smallpox-which U.S. doctors now rarey get a chance to identify...
...pharmaceutical firms* are now producing Salk vaccine or hurrying to get into production. The vaccine works on a principle that has already provided protection against such traditional plagues as smallpox and yellow fever. When they attack human beings or other mammals, most viruses stimulate the invaded system to manufacture tiny protein particles called antibodies. If the system under assault does not have enough of these antibodies or cannot manufacture them fast enough, the victim may die or, with polio, suffer permanent crippling...
...Harvard. Then he joined the Peace Corps in 1971 and found himself working alone in the desolate villages of Ethiopia, struggling to learn Amharic, the country's language. It was there that the power of science changed his life. He vaccinated tens of thousands of people against smallpox as part of a team that effectively stopped the disease in the area. Many villagers, who believed he was a doctor, came to him with their afflictions, but he could do little to help. Recalls Holmberg: "I was frustrated by not knowing what was going...