Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like Berg, Cohen wanted to insert new genes artificially into bacteria. But where Berg resorted to a virus as his transport system, Cohen opted for plasmids, which he had been studying in his lab. As he listened to Boyer's description of his work that night in Waikiki, however, Cohen realized that there might be a short cut. Boyer and his associates had found a so-called restriction enzyme that cuts DNA precisely at predetermined points, and performs this surgery in an especially helpful way: at each end of the severed, twin-stranded molecule, it leaves an extra...
...twin breakthroughs?Beyer's surgical enzyme and Cohen's plasmids?opened the door to an extraordinary scientific capability. If they were used together, almost any gene?from a virus, a frog or a man?could be spliced into the plasmid. Cohen named
...threat to most children, but it can be fatal to newborns and to thousands of youngsters whose natural immunity has been weakened by chemotherapy for diseases such as leukemia. Until recently, the only protection against chicken pox was an antiserum derived from the blood of patients recovering from the virus, since antibody levels are unusually high during convalescence. Locating such people is costly and difficult, so supplies were always scarce...
...Biological Laboratories have found a way to screen out and concentrate chicken pox antibodies from the blood of healthy people. The procedure is similar to that used to extract gamma globulin for treatment of those exposed to rabies and hepatitis. Called VZIG, for Varicella-Zoster Immune Globulin, after the virus that causes chicken pox and shingles, the antiserum became available through the American Red Cross blood centers last week. The first supplies will go to vulnerable newborns and children with leukemia or weakened immune systems; a dosage provides immunity for about six weeks. But VZIG is not being recommended...
...budget mahatma of the macabre. Like Carpenter's The Fog and Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Cronenberg's movies are hip parables of contemporary moral malaise, in which ordinary people are infected by a malignancy as invisible and pervasive as the most swinish flu virus. As his vision aged, like rancid fruit, the malignancy crept closer to home. In They Came from Within, it was a small, snouty bug, transmitted from mouth to mouth during sex. In Rabid it was a bloodsucking organ that sprouts from the carrier's armpit. In The Brood and Scanners...