Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Late in the 19th Century a Russian named Iwanowski demonstrated the existence of an infectious something smaller than bacteria by passing a solution from diseased tobacco plants through a Chamberland filter. In time it was found that many animal and human diseases were also due to such viruses: rabies, distemper, foot-and-mouth disease, encephalitis, poliomyelitis, measles, yellow fever, certain tumors, common colds. At Princeton Dr. Stanley grew acres of tobacco plants, infected them with the disease known as tobacco mosaic, ground up their wizened leaves, extracted their juices. This liquid was highly infectious to normal plants. But the deadly...
...virus, found to contain carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen like thousands of organic compounds, could now be contemplated as a huge protein molecule -a "macro-molecule." Was it alive or not alive? No known living thing is crystalline in form. It would be fantastic to imagine a crystalline pig. Yet the virus showed the ability to reproduce itself in great quantities when stimulated by contact with a plant. Thus the Princeton chemist had discovered an apparent bridge between living and nonliving matter. This was a discovery of Nobel Prize calibre...
...along with Vitamin C in fruit juices and adrenals, a "permeability factor" which he calls Vitamin P, not present in synthesized C. Vitamin P keeps the walls of body cells in good condition. Without both, a person develops pyorrhea and scurvy. He bleeds easily, may be subject to certain virus and bacterial diseases. With an ample supply of these vitamins, he can overcome such ailments. Although Hungarian pepper is the most abundant source of these vitamins, this condiment is little known in the U. S. Most convenient source of the vitamins thus remain the citrus fruits, especially lemons and oranges...
Then Svedberg, Wyckoff and others weighed & measured the giants by whirling them in powerful ultracentrifuges. Stanley found that the virus which causes tobacco mosaic disease in plants is a huge molecule, which was weighed by Svedberg and Wyckoff at 17,000,000 times as much as a hydrogen atom. The virus of noninfectious rabbit warts was isolated as a protein molecule weighing 20,000,000 units...
...tough question of the atomic architecture inside the molecule has yielded somewhat to the discovery that it must conform to mathematical limitations grouped under "stoichiometrical law." Stanley's tobacco mosaic virus, for example, was found to be not a long, thin chain but roughly egg-shaped...