Word: southwestern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fast-forward to last summer, when three different groups of researchers cloned a gene that makes it possible to reactivate telomerase in human-tissue samples. The race was on to see who could make cells live longer than they normally do. Researchers from Geron and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas infected normal cells with a virus that had been genetically engineered to switch telomerase on. In every case the cells' telomeres lengthened instead of shortening, while the cells stayed healthy and continued to divide. "When we submitted the paper, we were at 20 generations past...
...Wileys may look like tourists, but they are not. Emigres from urban America, they have come to rural southwestern Ohio to escape L.A.'s noise, traffic, crime, smog and cost of living--not to mention its cutthroat film industry--and reach for the kind of safe, close-knit way of life Jim recalls from his childhood in tiny Sharpsville, Pa. "Living in L.A., my vision became blurred and twisted," he says. "I was spoiled. I had secretaries doing everything for me. All I did was talk on the phone and sit in traffic...
Comanche Moon is in some ways the best of the subsidiary novels propped against the central narration of Lonesome Dove. The core of it is a moody, valedictory view of Southwestern Indians at the time just before and just after the Civil War (which appears only as a distant commotion). Comanche raiding bands in Texas are beginning to starve because whites to the north have slaughtered the buffalo herds. The author develops a couple of minor figures we've met before, the fearsome chief Buffalo Hump and a quizzical tracker named Famous Shoes, who are among the best characters...
...result, Legends of the American Desert (Knopf; 534 pages; $30) is a fascinating and sometimes bewildering profusion of themes that appear, join, separate and disappear like the braided channels of a Southwestern river. It is also an impressive exercise in graceful journalism. Chapters on the Anasazi and Havasupai tribes, for instance, and the Jesuits and Franciscans, don't read like potted histories ploddingly typed from a writer's file cards. There's no dust in this desert history. Colonizers and colonized live in the author's mind; ideas about them boil up, and off he goes in pursuit...
...memorable chapter deals with the Tarahumara Indians of "the rugged southwestern corner of the state of Chihuahua, in the heart of the Sierra Madre Occidental." They are legendary long- distance runners--tall, lean, high-cheekboned men who play a nonstop kickball game over what may be two days and at distances of up to 100 miles. But when they cross the finish line, they more or less ignore the winner, acting as if nothing unusual had happened. Shoumatoff writes that the Tarahumara never accepted the Spanish culture and religion, but that lately their culture has been brutalized by narco-traficantes...