Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even more important was Lederberg's later discovery that viruses preying on bacteria can change the heredity of their victims. In this process, which is called transduction, a virus invades a bacterium, breaks it up and reorganizes its material into hundreds of new virus particles. If these particles in turn infect another bacterium and it survives, they sometimes change it into a new strain. Apparently the viruses, acting somewhat like submicroscopic spermatozoa, take hereditary material from the first bacterium and transfer it to the second...
...brilliant young investigator, Dr. Francis Peyton Rous (rhymes with mouse), the discovery proved an embarrassment. Some colleagues smiled tolerantly, but many cancer researchers, even within his own institute, denounced the work as preposterous. "A filterable virus?" Bosh! This would be an infectious agent, and thus cancer, they argued, would be an infectious disease. Rous's experiments, they said, must have been defective. Some critics were not even shaken when Rous went on to find the viruses that caused other types of cancers in fowls and small mammals...
There is no longer any doubt that Rous's experiments were superbly executed and that his conclusions were sound. The Rous sarcoma and many others in a growing family of animal tumors are now known to be caused by viruses, although the definition of viruses (ultramicroscopic particles on the borderline of the animal and chemical kingdoms) may have to be revised to cover them all. It still seems that something more than the virus alone is needed to trigger the outbreak of cancerous growth, e.g., chemical or physical irritation. But the importance of the virus can no longer...
...complete mystery. According to Surgeons Tilden C. Everson and Warren H. Cole, who have long studied it at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, there is no single cause, but there are likely combinations of causes. Some people may be able to develop antibodies against a possible cancer virus; others may have hormonal changes that are just right for killing cancer. Nutrition of cancer may also be reduced or regression may follow fever or acute infection. Such possibilities are all remote; but the fact that the body sometimes knows how to kill cancer may some day show...
...both tests, parakeets were fed on a schedule of two days on millet seed enriched with Aureomycin, one day on plain feed. After 15 days, virtually all became virus-free. Hartz Mountain will begin marketing the treated feed in September, and parakeet owners can relax at last. Dr. Meyer's next project: a medicated feed for table birds, especially turkeys, which are also subject to ornithosis epidemics (TIME, March...