Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...said Zacharias, now has atom bombs 50 times more powerful than those that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there are other weapons in the new alphabet of destruction: 1) bacteriological bombs containing either botulinus toxin or psittacosis virus; 2) a U.S. -developed biological spray that "can wipe out all forms of life in a large city"; 3) some sort of military application of cosmic rays which is now, he thought, being developed by Russian scientists...
Zacharias punctuated his article with two sentences framed in Doomsday black: "A single milliliter† of the highly infectious psittacosis [parrot fever] virus could kill 20 million men. This virus can be produced cheaply in bulk by a small laboratory anywhere in the world...
...Viruses, said Stanley, are too small to be seen with ordinary microscopes; but electron microscopes show them plainly. The tobacco mosaic virus, for instance, is a slender rod. The rods affect one another at a distance as if they were tiny bar-magnets. This "long-range force," still unexplained, may prove the key to many deep life mysteries...
Stanley and his group discovered that a virus can be "inactivated" (apparently killed) by chemical processes. By a reversal of the process, the dead virus can be brought back to "life." This is the closest that man has yet come to touching off life in a test tube...
Bigger Game. Viruses are proteins, and are therefore made chiefly of amino acids. By delicate chemical methods, Stanley's group knocked out or added amino acids. Vigorous viruses became weak. Mild viruses turned into virulent killers. In one case a transformed virus transmitted its new character to its offspring. For the first time, man had succeeded in changing a virus' heredity...