Word: toxin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Roden works in Presley Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics R. John Collier's lab at Harvard Medical School studying the biological toxin anthrax.The goal of her research is to find out how the anthrax toxin is inserted into cells, she said...
Opponents don't care who made Terminator. To them the idea is Frankensteinian on its face. After tweezing out a toxin-producing stretch of DNA from a noncrop plant, gene scientists managed to knit the lethal genetic material into the genome of commercial plants. They also inserted two other bits of coding that would keep the killer gene dormant until late in the crop's development, when the toxin would affect only the seed and not the plant. But because the seed company needs to generate enough product to sell in the first place, the scientists included one more...
Monsanto disagrees--and not without reason. Say what they will about Terminator, even some detractors admit that the company designs a hell of a seed. The maker of one of the world's most popular herbicides, Monsanto has created crops that are resistant to the toxin. With it, farmers can spray away weeds without spraying away their harvest. The company has also developed plants with a built-in toxin that is harmless to humans but lethal to insects. If farmers in the developing world use these muscled-up crops--even with Terminator genes--their harvests might increase enough to cover...
However, interviews with 14 current and past employees, as well as building-inspection reports obtained by TIME, suggest that Southwest's San Antonio center is a "sick building" whose closed-circulation air supply has been contaminated by toxin-producing molds and bacteria...
...prepared by Crawford Risk Control Services for Southwest's insurance company, rated airborne spore counts inside the building as "normal" compared with those outside. Reviewing this record, Dr. David Straus of Texas Tech University's Health Sciences Center observed, "There's nothing normal about Stachybotrys. It produces a bad toxin. That's all I can say." Moreover, argues Cornell's Alan Hedge, the inspectors "only took air samples on one day, and fungi don't produce spores all the time. Typically, you [sample] over a series of days." Testing for mycotoxins and bacterial endotoxins, experts agree, might have told...