Word: bacteria
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...from a mycology lab one floor below. Luck would have it that Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate--except for the area surrounding the moldy contaminant. Seeing that halo was Fleming's "Eureka" moment, an instant of great personal insight and deductive reasoning. He correctly deduced that the mold must have released a substance that inhibited the growth of the bacteria...
...stuff of which scientific myths are made. Fleming, a young Scottish research scientist with a profitable side practice treating the syphilis infections of prominent London artists, was pursuing his pet theory--that his own nasal mucus had antibacterial effects--when he left a culture plate smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria on his lab bench while he went on a two-week holiday...
...Howard Florey, an Australian-born physiologist. This team had technical talent, especially in a chemist named Ernst Boris Chain, who had fled Nazi Germany. Armed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, these scientists made it their objective to identify and isolate substances from molds that could kill bacteria. The mission was inspired by the earlier work of Gerhard Domagk, who in 1935 showed that the injection of a simple compound, Prontosil, cured systemic streptococcal infections. This breakthrough demonstrated that invading bacteria could be killed with a drug and led to a fevered search in the late 1930s for similar compounds...
PLAYING CHICKEN It's bad enough that chickens harbor harmful campylobacter bacteria that can sicken humans. Now a soon-to-be-released study shows that the bug is increasingly resistant to quinolines, the main class of antibiotics used to treat the infection. One reason may be the routine use of quinolines in chicken feed. The percentage of quinoline-resistant campylobacter infections has risen to 10.3% today from 5% in 1995--the year quinolines were approved for use in chicken chow. For antibiotic-free birds, try organic...
...problematic to the earth: it will not explode as a result of increasing temperatures, and other forms of life will adapt and evolve (or not) to the changing conditions. However, climate change is immensely threatening to our species, because the floods, droughts and proliferation of parasites and bacteria harm our survivorship on this planet. So although the pervasive icons of environmentalism are baby seals or coral reefs, make no mistake about it, the movement is at heart about the human species, about our nations, our communities, and our quality of life...