Word: smithsonian
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Youngest member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, Buster Old, a 23-year-old photo-lab technician in the Army's Signal Corps, has been an amateur zoologist since childhood, is now a highly respected, unofficial investigator for the Smithsonian Institution. Ever since August, the Smithsonian's molluskmen have been expectantly watching the mails for the tobacco tins, metal film containers and glass medicine bottles in which he has sent them nearly 500 specimens of Korean frogs, lizards, snakes, crayfish and snails...
...Korea, Old sent a few sample shipments during stopovers in Hawaii and Japan. But his snail searches really paid off when he began exploring the zoological possibilities of the battle zone. ("Hunting for snails and so forth is a wonderful thing for guys like that," explains one Smithsonian curator. "Gets their minds off the bullets whizzing around...
...doctors who never tire of arguing about the age and origin of diseases, a Washington orthopedist rattled some old bones last week. Exhibited to the District of Columbia Medical Society was a collection of human bones culled with care from the Smithsonian Institution's vast collection by Orthopedist William J. Tobin. Beside each bone was an X-ray diagnosis of what ailed the long-dead patient...
Accurately dated (by tree rings) as undoubtedly pre-Columbian is an Indian pueblo from which the Smithsonian Institution got a diseased vertebra. Dr. Tobin's diagnosis: tuberculosis. Another revealing item (because cancer was, and still is, rare among Indians): a pre-Columbian pelvis which showed that its original owner suffered from a spreading carcinoma of the prostate...
Some more recent Indians proved to have had some odd customs. While investigating village sites near the Trinity River in Texas, diggers under Robert T. Stephenson of the Smithsonian found "ceremonial pits" 90 feet across and ten feet deep. In one was the skeleton of a bear, laid out with a full ceremonial burial. Apparently the Trinity River Indians worshiped or otherwise honored bears, as did the hairy Ainu of northern Japan...