Word: things
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...biggest problem, however, is that the faith of the American people in the experts has been badly shaken. People have learned, for one thing, that certified technical gospel is far from immortal. Medicine changes its mind about tonsillectomies that used to be routinely performed. Those dazzling phosphate detergents turn out to be anathema to the environment. Scarcely a week goes by without the credibility of one expert or another falling afoul of some spike of fresh news. (Just last week an array of nonprescription sedatives used by millions was linked, through the ingredient methapyrilene, to cancer.) Moreover, experts are constantly...
...obviously 1 not quite fit as a fiedler, but nobody in Boston's packed Symphony Hall had expected him to be. For one thing, the Hub's beloved grouch and historic landmark, white-thatched Conductor Arthur Fiedler, 84, was climbing the podium to commence his 50th season as leader of the Boston Pops. More, Fiedler scarcely five months earlier had undergone massive brain surgery. The years and fears showed mainly in the fit of his bib: Fiedler ill had lost so much weight that Wife Ellen insisted on smaller tails from Brooks Brothers. Otherwise, things Pops-wise were...
This last accomplishment has brought Thomas more attention than all the others put together. A collection of 29 of his essays was published in 1974 under the title The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. No one expected much, least of all the author. For one thing, most Americans escape from the study of biology as fast as their teachers will let them; if they think of the subject at all, they are likely to remember rubbery dead frogs and the smell of formaldehyde. For another, Thomas made few concessions to the ignorance of laymen. He certainly...
...apparently is still able to reproduce; its offspring swim off and become normal adult jellyfish. The slug also produces larvae, but these are rather quickly trapped and subsumed by the new jellyfish. Aha, one would think, the jellyfish are getting back at the slugs for prior mutilations. No such thing. "Soon the snails," Thomas writes, "undigested and insatiable, begin to eat, browsing away first at the radial canals, then the borders of the rim, finally the tentacles, until the jellyfish becomes reduced in substance by being eaten, while the snail grows correspondingly in size." At the end, the jellyfish...
After some 45 years in medicine, Thomas remains a carrier of infectious enthusiasm. "It's the greatest damned entertainment in the world," he says of his work. "It's just plain fun learning some thing that you didn't know . . . There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded." He is still astonished at things that others, mistakenly, take for granted. Why, he muses in The Medusa and the Snail, did people make such a fuss over the test-tube baby in England? The true miracle was, as always, the union of egg and sperm...