Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Parliament considered ways of dealing with what Indian President Giani Zail Singh called "the virus of communalism," the ballots were finally tabulated late last week. The Congress (I) Party won a clear majority, taking 90 out of the 108 seats in the state legislature and four of the five seats for Parliament. That came as no surprise, since the small Communist Party (Marxist) was the only other party contesting the election. Officials said that voting had been heavy (70%) in the Bengali districts, where there was no violence, but that 18 state and seven parliamentary contests...
Interest in possible viral causes of cancer peaked in the 1960s, when various animal studies suggested that viruses could cause turnors. But apart from rare correlations (such as that between the Herpes simplex II virus and cervical cancer in women), researchers could not establish a general cause and effect relationship between viruses and cancer. Recent advances in the field of genetic engineering have paralleled a surge of interest in the possibility of a genetic cause of cancer. But apart from circumstancial evidence for genetic causes of such rare cancers as Burkitt's lymphoma (as Harvard recently announced), the possibility...
...first breaks in cancer genetics came from the field of virology. Scientists have known since 1908 that a virus could cause malignant tumors in chickens. Over the decades, it was found that viruses could cause tumors in mice, cats, cows and a menagerie of other species. But not until 1980 did anyone identify a virus that causes cancer in human cells: Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., isolated a virus that can transform normal human white blood cells into the malignant type found in a rare cancer called T-cell leukemia. The same virus...
Researchers are also learning just how a cancer virus can alter normal cell DNA. Some cancer viruses contain cancer-causing genes, or oncogenes. When these genes are isolated and then transferred into healthy cell cultures in the laboratory, they create malignant cells. In the past decade, more than 15 oncogenes have been found in cancer viruses...
...Chicago conference. Researchers representing teams at Harvard and at Philadelphia's Wistar Institute reported that they had analyzed the piece of chromosome 8 involved in Burkitt's lymphoma. Both found that it contained a gene virtually identical to a cancer-causing gene isolated years earlier from a virus. The oncogene is located at the precise point where the fragment of chromosome 8 broke off. Thus the first link has been made between a known oncogene and an easily detectable change in the chromosomes of cancer patients...