Word: venomous
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Trap at Night. At Cornell University Medical College, Drs. Mary H. Loveless and William R. Fackler have worked out a painstaking method of trapping bees and wasps by chloroforming them in the nests at night, storing them in a freezer, and performing delicate surgery to remove their venom sacs while they are in a half-frozen stupor. The venom from the sacs is pooled, then injected in small but gradually increasing doses into sensitive subjects. In the New York City area, the doctors found, the most vicious stinger by far is the yellow jacket (Vespula maculifrons, represented elsewhere...
Because surgery to remove venom sacs is so difficult, commercial producers of immunizing extracts prefer to grind up the whole insects and make them into an injectable preparation. (In this method, one school argues, there may be a danger of sensitizing a subject to allergy-causing proteins from other parts of the insect's body.) At the Hollister-Stier Laboratories in Spokane, Bacteriologist Edward L. Foubert Jr. has concluded that only a few species of Hymenoptera are important stingers in any one area, and that since most victims do not know just which varieties have stung them...
Each stinging insect's venom, most researchers agree, contains four or five protein substances that can cause severe sensitization reactions. In combining any two insects, e.g., wasp and yellow jacket, two of the proteins are likely to be identical, while each insect will also have two or three different ones. Thus the polyvalent extract from four species probably contains a dozen proteins, should help a sensitized victim to build up immunity against...
Tick paralysis is caused by a venom that the female tick is believed to secrete only when producing eggs. It affects children more severely than adults. Myrna Tubby's tick proved to be Dermacentor variabilis, common in the southeastern U.S. (other areas have closely related species), and superabundant at this season. For parents removing ticks, doctors prescribe: gloves, tweezers, and extreme care to get the tick's head...
Since Kingsley Amis is an amiable satirist, Jim Dixon grins and bears the fact that he has attained status without achieving size. At worst, his is the venom of a reasonably contented rattlesnake. Under pressure, Dixon retreats to the practical joke as readily as Walter Mitty did to the hero-fantasy; when socially and emotionally discomfited, he makes faces-"his Edith Sitwell face," "his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face." At novel's end he tries to articulate his flashes of Angst in the pan during a drunken public lecture: "The point about Merrie England is that...