Word: snippet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Making clever use of the fact that the familiar infectious agents called retroviruses will attack only cells that are in the process of dividing, researchers at the National Institutes of Health spliced a snippet of DNA from a herpes virus into one of these retroviruses and injected the combination into rats suffering from brain cancer. Since cancer cells are about the only cells that are dividing in a cancer-infected brain, the viruses were supposed to invade those cells and multiply. After five days, the rats were treated with an antiherpes drug. The hope was that the toxin would kill...
...film clips and interviews, the program takes us back to the ancient 1950s, when virtually the only blacks on TV were comic stereotypes: Amos 'n' Andy, Beulah and the occasional bumbling menial. "There's no room for prejudice in our profession," Milton Berle tells Danny Thomas in a snippet from Berle's old Texaco Star Theater. But of the black stars of the '50s who had their own variety shows, only Nat King Cole lasted a full season, and he was canceled thereafter when he could not find sponsors...
...even this snippet of DNA is not enough to ensure a masculine result. An elevated level of the hormone testosterone is also required during the pregnancy. Where does it come from? The fetus' own undescended testes. In those rare cases in which the tiny body does not respond to the hormone, a genetically male fetus develops sex organs that look like a clitoris and vagina rather than a penis. Such people look and act female. The majority marry and adopt children...
...polymerase chain reaction, a deceptively simple process with an ungainly name, may turn out to be the most important tool for genetics research since Mendel's peas. PCR takes a snippet of DNA and in a matter of hours clones up to a billion perfect copies. In the past year it has proved invaluable in everything from making prenatal diagnoses of genetic diseases to identifying rape suspects from a single sperm cell...
...Reagan, who kept hope alive during the interregnum between the California governorship and the White House by doing radio commentary. Jackson's advisers hope the show will present a "cooler" Jesse Jackson than the image viewers usually get. "Most people only know Jesse from a 20-to-30-second snippet of a speech, where he's near a crescendo," says longtime aide Frank Watkins. "In TV terms he's 'hot,' and he scares the bejesus out of white people...