Word: tatum
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...Beadle teamed up with Dr. Edward L. Tatum, a chemist now of the Rockefeller Institute, and selected a new laboratory victim, the so-called red bread mold (Neurospora crassa), which is really a beautiful coral pink in its natural state, unmolested by geneticists. Neurospora is a geneticist's dream. When properly introduced, it mates and reproduces sexually. It also grows nonsexually, so a truckload of mold with the same heredity can be grown, if desirable, from a single spore. But the best thing about Neurospora is that it asks for so little. It thrives on a medium containing nothing...
Mutated Mold. The Beadle and Tatum plan for Neurospora was to try to create strains that differ from the normal mold in simple, chemical ways. Their method was simple, too. They irradiated mold with X rays to induce mutations. Then they gathered spores formed by sexual reproduction and laid them out on a sheet of agar jelly containing the minimum nutrients that natural wild mold requires. Some of the spores sprouted and grew normally, showing that they had not been mutated in any obvious way. Some were dead, perhaps mutated too much...
Down in Florida, Miami Coach Andy Gustafson was doing some brainwork too. "Tatum knows we have a good ground attack, with a lot of power to the outside. I'm guessing he'll try to stunt his defense and concentrate on stopping us outside. My logical move, then, is to try to run inside against his big boys...
North Carolina's Tatum, working behind the safety of a first-period touchdown, sent his ends deep, while his backs held onto the ball as if they never meant to pass. When Miami's defenders finally decided that those ends were merely a decoy, they moved up close to the line, and the Tarheel trap sprang shut. A pair of running passes set up North Carolina's second touchdown, and the Tarheels were out front for keeps...
Satisfied that the final score is the only statistic that counts, Big Jim Tatum groaned with relief: "I'm so plumb tuckered out I feel like I played myself. I don't mind sayin', I guessed my guts...