Word: celle
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...sweating cement, and trusts no one but its own masons with the mixing of it. The balls add to the game's speed and cost: they are golf-ball size but made like baseballs-tightly wound cotton thread covered with leather. They shoot around the cell-like court so fast that experts judge the ball's speed not only by the eye but by the "bock" sound it makes hitting the wall. Racquets, thin-shafted and fragile, are also costly. The late Charles Williams, regarded as one of the greatest of all racquets players, once broke...
...Spiegelman and Kamen worked with yeast cells, proved that their chemical behavior could be changed, while the genes remained unchanged. This suggested strongly that something besides the genes affected cell characteristics...
...Self-Duplicating Bodies." When the cells were allowed to multiply freely, some of the protein molecules characteristic of the nucleus (where the genes are) tended to flow into the "cytoplasm," the part of the cell outside the nucleus. This indicated (along with related biochemical data) that the genes were sending out "partial replicas" of themselves, which entered the cytoplasm and multiplied there independently...
These busy "self-duplicating" bodies the scientists called "plasmagenes." There are probably thousands of them, competing actively for nourishment in the cell's body like cattle, prairie dogs and rabbits on an overstocked range. Anything which affects this competition may favor certain plasmagenes above the others, allowing the favored ones to multiply abnormally, as rabbits once did in Australia. A change in the balance of plasmagenes affects the cell's chemical behavior, as rabbits affected Australia by eating much of its rangeland bare of grass. The cell's genes take no part in the transformation...
...Control. What good was the discovery? The biological revolutionists were reluctant to say. But they admitted (with a gleam in their eyes) that it gave a new, promising method of controlling cell life and growth. They had already con trolled yeast cells by regulating competition among plasmagenes. Future biologists might do the same with bacteria cells or man cells...