Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...main vaccine protects the body from three flu strains--A/Mississippi, found in 1985, A/Chile, found in 1983, and a newly-identified virus, B/Ann Arbor. Another shot guards against a flu strain known as A/Taiwan, identified in Asia last January...
...that flu marches on, while other viral scourges such as polio and measles have been largely conquered in the developed world? The vanquished viruses, it seems, were relatively stable, seldom changing their structure. This enabled their victims, once infected, to develop permanent immunity and allowed scientists to develop vaccines that were effective year after year. The influenza virus, however, is constantly changing the configuration of its surface proteins. Because of these changes, immune-system antibodies, developed in response to either a vaccination or a previous case of flu, fail to recognize and attack the altered virus. As a result...
...compound the problem, no one knows for sure how the virus circumnavigates the globe in just a few months, although travelers and migrating birds probably help it along. And perhaps because of commercial jets, flu has been spreading more rapidly in recent years, giving health officials even less time to prepare new vaccines. For all these reasons, says University of Pittsburgh Epidemiologist Frederick Ruben, "the only thing that's predictable about influenza is that it's unpredictable...
...choose tobacco? Says Howell: "Tobacco is the laboratory rat of plant molecular biologists. It's a model system that we use in these sorts of experiments." Responding to orders from the firefly-virus gene, the plants dutifully produced their own luciferase...
Response from the scientific community is already enthusiastic; labs in the U.S., Europe and Asia, as well as several biotechnology companies, have requested samples of the tailored gene containing the firefly-virus DNA for use in their own research. Another UCSD team has taken this technique a step further, transferring the luciferase gene into monkey cells growing in laboratory culture...