Word: spermatozoa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...process, which is called transduction, a virus invades a bacterium, breaks it up and reorganizes its material into hundreds of new virus particles. If these particles in turn infect another bacterium and it survives, they sometimes change it into a new strain. Apparently the viruses, acting somewhat like submicroscopic spermatozoa, take hereditary material from the first bacterium and transfer it to the second...
...earth's fastest-breeding peoples. Trinidadians shunned the simplest mechanical devices, which Wright sadly pronounced, in any case, "an upper-mental-class activity, no good at all for Indians, Indonesians or Japanese." He finally tried a really simple, standard tablet that foams in the vagina, should kill all spermatozoa. Same bafflement: women took the tablets home and went on conceiving...
...Researchers at the State University of Iowa seem to have found the perfect contraceptive-for rats. While they were fed nitrofuran compounds (chemicals obtained from oat hulls), male rats produced no spermatozoa, Dr. Warren 0. Nelson reported, but later they recovered their fertility and sired normal young. The University of Texas' Dr. Donald Duncan, edging out on a limb, said nitrofuran "could be the [human] contraceptive of the future...
...many cases of failure to conceive, said Rio de Janeiro's Dr. Arthur Campos da Paz, the trouble is that cervical secretions are hostile to spermatozoa. This can be established by a simple smear test. If the secretion is normally receptive, it dries in a marked, fernlike pattern; if it is hostile, the pattern is different or absent. And in such cases, doses of a female hormone may fix things...
Father Luyet's modest report of his work furthered some extravagant speculation. Perhaps men might be put into deep-freeze and revived thousands of years later. At the very least, spermatozoa from exceptional males could Le saved to fertilize females of the future. Unconcerned with such lurid prophecies, Biologist Luyet went on with his experiment...