Word: bacteria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the NASA base at Wallops Island, Va., a Little Joe rocket (a cluster of eight solid-fuel rockets) took off with a full-scale astronaut capsule perched on nose. No man was inside it, only a rhesus monkey named Sam and a collection of meal worms, bacteria, molds and other biological samples. Strapped to a kind of cocoon lined with plastic foam sat Sam the monkey, riding in astronaut's "chair." Sam and cocoon were enclosed in an inner, air-conditioned " logical package," thick with straps, wi and instruments to test Sam's reactions...
...related process, testosterone can be transformed into testololactone. Chemists at E. R. Squibb & Sons had found that bacteria could make testololactone by fermentation. When they tried to produce it this way in bulk, said Dr. Segaloff, the bugs rebelled and turned out instead a variant called delta-1-testololactone. It was just as well: testololactone has proved to have all the virilizing properties of testosterone. But the delta1 variant, tested so far in 24 patients, proved in seven cases to be as potent as testosterone in suppressing cancer growth, and with no virilizing effects...
...well that he rarely had to ask for an instrument. A laconic New Englander, he uttered hardly a word. One thing that set this operation apart: in the theater, also sterile-garbed, was Microbiologist Ruth B. Kundsin, who took air samples every few minutes to test for harmful bacteria floating over the patient's widely opened abdomen. For more than an hour the bacteria count stayed reassuringly...
...theater and turned over the job of closing the wound to an assistant. This man was, as Dr. Kundsin told the American College of Surgeons last week, "a loquacious type." Though he wore the conventional double-thickness, sterilized gauze mask, he breathed heavily through it. The bacteria count in the air increased fivefold. After the operation, Dr. Kundsin took smears from the young resident's nose and throat. The cultures proved him to be a fertile carrier of Staphylococcus aureus-and some strains of staph are the deadliest bacteria now plaguing hospitals in the U.S. and all other countries...
With the wholesale, often haphazard use of antimicrobial drugs (sulfas and antibiotics), easy-to-kill bacteria are becoming rarer, while resistant strains, especially of Staph. aureus, are rampant. As Boston's Dr. Carl Waldemar Walter told the surgeons: "These drugs kill the sissies among the bacteria and leave the toughs." Philadelphia's Dr. Robert I. Wise reported a nationwide eruption of "hot" staph strains since 1950. Doctors and nurses are the greatest menace: in some areas, 67% of them are healthy carriers of hot staph, as against 30% of their patients. By contrast, the rate among people...