Word: virologist
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...beyond protecting children. Even those who recover uneventfully can be painfully reminded of the disease in adulthood by shingles. The chickenpox virus is a member of the herpes family of viruses that can lie dormant along nerves for decades and be suddenly reactivated, possibly by stress or injury. Says Virologist Stanley Plotkin of the University of Penn sylvania: "Shingles causes severe, insane pain in one in 10,000 Americans a year...
Using an electron microscope, a team of researchers at the University of California at Davis isolated the virus from the blood of monkeys infected with simian AIDS. In the current issue of Science, Virologist Preston Marx and his colleagues report that when the virus was injected into healthy monkeys, the animals developed the disease. The virus belongs to a family known as retroviruses, which are prime suspects as the cause of human AIDS. Said Marx of the discovery: "It gives us a marvelous opportunity to understand how a specific virus can attack the immune system and destroy...
...techniques that are transforming modern medicine. Using the sophisticated new cut-and-paste methods of manipulating genes, the researchers were able to transform ordinary smallpox vaccine into vaccines that may be able to prevent the other three diseases. So far the results have been tested in animals only, but Virologist Enzo Paoletti, a senior scientist on the project, is confident that they will work in humans as well. What is more, Paoletti's Albany-based team has already begun work on a version for malaria, the No. 1 infectious health threat in the world. Says Paoletti...
What Paoletti and his colleague, Virologist Dennis Panicali, set out to do was to alter the genetic material, or DNA, of cowpox virus by inserting a gene from another virus-herpes, hepatitis B or influenza (see diagram). The goal of these microscopic manipulations is to develop a vaccine that will fool the immune system and make it swing into action. A smallpox preventive that expresses a herpes trait, for instance, will provoke the body into creating antibodies against herpes. The person is then protectively armed against an actual attack of the disease...
...report itself took longer, and the setting in the university's Rickham auditorium was elaborate. Under the klieg lights set up for TV and newsreel cameras, surrounded by microphones and 150 reporters, sat the unquestioned hero of the occasion: Dr. Jonas Edward Salk, 40, the determined, youthful-looking virologist who for five years had battled in his University of Pittsburgh laboratory to lick polio. Next to him sat the University of Michigan's Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., 54, one of the U.S.'s most eminent epidemiologists, who had been chosen by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis...