Word: tapeworms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...thing the curious doctor was busy disentangling and studying last week looked like an endless skein of white rubber band. Actually, he explained happily, it was 100 ft. of rare tapeworm which he found in the intestine of a whale captured off Catalina Island. Although his specialization is the dwarf mouse tapeworm, a common human parasite, Dr. Donald Heyneman, 32, of the University of California at Los Angeles, finds all tapeworms fascinating. He hates to pass up a chance to find a new species, for the surface of tape-wormology has hardly been scratched...
Parasitologists do not agree on whether a tapeworm is a single individual or a family tree of ancestors and descendants. The head has the only brains (a trace of nerve tissue), but the segments are practically independent...
...great crisis of a tapeworm's life comes in the egg stage. When it is first launched on the world, usually in fecal matter, an egg cannot survive unless it happens to be swallowed by an animal that can serve as intermediate host. Most eggs perish, but the survivors that find a home spring into a burst of frantic activity. Out of their capsules come hook-armed embryos that claw their way through the intestines of the intermediate host and form cysts in its tissues...
...gives the chuckle to TV's 40,000,000 chuckleheads, but to those who know him he is a "lumbering pachyderm with the face of a pig, the smell of a skunk, the appetite of a tomcat and the voice of Joe Miller." He has a tapeworm hunger for the attention, laughter and love of 40 million people, an insatiable craving to receive all the gifts he himself is incapable of giving...
...speech. But Old Cock talks enough for two-his language flows like pig's ear in a boozer on Saturday night and is rich as hot gammon. In a country of free teeth he has only five blackened stumps ("tombstones") and possesses nothing much but a cherished tapeworm, which he "gasses" with liberal quantities of raw onion. But his friendship with Arp glows like the lavatory float of "valuable copper" in a desert of uncommercial junk...