Word: stuffs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That, however, was the very thing that caught the world's imagination. Human cloning! The stuff of science fiction seemed about to become reality. Even before other labs had confirmed Wilmut's discovery, a Harvard-trained physicist named Richard Seed proclaimed his intention to clone humans for commercial purposes. Cloning, he declared grandiosely, was "the first serious step toward becoming one with...
...envied--and longed for--the authentic touch and timelessness of marble and wood. The chord struck by that line in The Graduate underscored how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907, when Leo Hendrik Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough that would change the stuff our world is made...
Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde (in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going) produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish. Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier goo. And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer, he was rewarded with a hard, translucent, infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic...
Bakelite became so visible in so many places that the company advertised it as "the material of a thousand uses." It became the stuff of everything from cigar holders and rosary beads to radio housings, distributor caps and telephone casings. A 1924 TIME cover story on Baekeland reported that those familiar with Bakelite's potential "claim that in a few years it will be embodied in every mechanical facility of modern civilization...
...developing flexible transistors made of plastic instead of silicon so they can make marvels such as a flat-panel television screen that will roll like a scroll up your living-room wall). Plastic may not be as vilified now as it was in 1967, but it's still a stuff that people love and hate. Every time a grocery clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?," the great debate between old and new, natural and synthetic, biodegradable and not, silently unfolds in a shopper's breast in the instant it takes to decide on the answer...