Word: specimens
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...around the edge of the tumor, gradually detaching its mass. Fifteen minutes later, he lifts the bulk of Schuler's cancer out of the hole he has made and places it in a stainless-steel bowl. "Call the tumor guys to come down and get a specimen," he orders. Another piece of the tumor will be sent to Black's own lab while he goes back in to clean up the cavity...
...quite different ways, memory is the focus of two distinctive new reminiscences. Burning the Days (Random House; 365 pages; $24), subtitled Recollection, is by James Salter, a prime specimen of that increasingly endangered subspecies, the "writer's writer." Salter is vastly admired by critics and fellow novelists for a rich, evocative style and storytelling marked by understated elegance, but his sales are well below the mega-level. His peers are right: Salter deserves a larger audience...
Meyer, luckily, is a pro. He has been working with sharks for years, and deftly avoids the open jaws. The last step before releasing the specimen is to tag it, a job Meyer assigns to me. I take a steak knife and stab an inch-long, inch-deep incision into the shark's back--no easy task, considering that its skin is as thick as a watermelon rind and as tough as leather. The shark doesn't even flinch. "That's nothing," Meyer reassures me, "compared with the wounds they inflict on each other during mating." I slip a barb...
...living creatures share a certain genetic heritage. But comparing a 378-unit sequence of DNA taken from mitochondria within a Neanderthal cell to modern DNA, Paabo's team found striking differences. Contemporary humans differ from one another by an average of eight variations in that sequence. The Neanderthal specimen differed in 27 places. By comparison, there are only 55 differences between modern humans and chimpanzees...
...have never drawn from a stuffed specimen," Audubon claimed in 1828. "Nature must be seen first alive." Like nearly everything else he said about himself, this statement was, at best, a half-truth. Audubon killed thousands of birds; before photography and high-resolution binoculars, that was the only possible way to render accurate images of them. But before Audubon shot them, he watched his subjects intensively, noting how they moved and behaved, the plants or habitats they preferred. When he had his bird in hand, he used wires to arrange the specimen in a characteristic pose...