Word: toxin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Orleans, U.S. Agriculture Department researchers along with local experts have been releasing a large nonbiting mosquito nicknamed Big Tox (after its scientific name, Toxorhynchites ambionensis), whose larvae dine on the larvae of smaller biting mosquitoes. Scientists have also had success with bacterial warfare: applying a larvae-killing toxin from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (which was discovered in Israel). But BTI is expensive, must be applied directly to a breeding site, and could encourage proliferation of BTi-resistant mosquitoes...
...research was banned completely in Cambridge, and eventually the City Council passed an ordinance which made binding the National Institute of Health's guidelines for genetics research. The council also outlawed the so-called "P-4" research, or the most dangerous experimentation dealing with infectious organisms such as diphtheria toxin and yellow fever virus...
...John R. Murphy, associate professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, who heads the research group, has speculated that successful manipulation of the toxin gene could result in the development of a treatment for malignant melanoma a type of skin cancer...
Although the experiments may prove un workable because of differences in the biology of the bacteria and the diphtheria toxin. Murphy has expressed hope that the project will demonstrate the feasibility of using a foreign host to produce toxin...
Murphy's previous work with the diphtheria toxin, one of the most dangerous persons known, has been considered safe because the fragments of the toxin molecule with which he works are biologically inactive...