Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...detect a plague mentality regarding the disease and those who carry it. Paradoxically, homosexuals are both victims of the plague mentality and themselves perpetrators of it. Because 73% of those who have AIDS are homosexuals, the general populace tends to look with suspicion on all homosexuals. Because the virus is transmitted by homosexual intercourse, homosexuals themselves bring to their intimate lives a desperate wariness and paranoia...
...many minds, AIDS is a kind of validation of Judeo-Christian morality. The virus is a terrible swift sword in the hand of God, a punishment for transgressions against his order. Thus the disease partakes, so to speak, of the prestige of the infinite. AIDS becomes a dramatically targeted refinement of the doctrine that all disease is a form of God's retribution upon fallen and sinful man. "Sickness is in fact the whip of God for the sins of many," said Cotton Mather. AIDS renews in many minds, sometimes in an almost unconscious way, questions of the problem...
...Beyond that argument, which itself now seems ancient, it is probable that in most minds a vague dread of the disease is accompanied by a sympathy for those afflicted. Sympathy, alas, is usually directly proportional to one's distance from the problem, and the sentiment will recede if the virus spreads and the sympathetic become the threatened...
Many Americans are developing a plague mentality about AIDS. The killer virus enforces divisions between "us" and "them...
...their frustratingly slow effort to conquer the common cold, medical scientists decades ago learned that the world's most prevalent disorder is usually caused by any of a hundred or so different kinds of viruses. Under an electron microscope, they all look like simple fuzzy balls, but the precise architecture of these so-called rhinoviruses has remained obscure. Last week teams of scientists from Purdue and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reported in the journal Nature that they had mapped in exquisite atomic detail the structure of a human cold virus called HRV14. Their achievement marked the first time that...