Word: plasm
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...Hall put these prenatal stepchildren into his tub and gave them the bell treatment. All had convulsions; two-thirds died. None behaved like noise-resistant black mice. This indicated, said Dr. Hall, that the tendency to die of audiogenic seizures is hereditary, carried by a gene in the germ plasm...
...humanity . . . with atomic bombs might not destroy civilization. But the production of abnormalities in 10% of the population by gene mutations induced by radioactivity may very easily destroy it." Destruction need not be immediate; mutated genes are insidious skulkers. They may lie in wait for centuries in the germ plasm, spreading by intermarriage through the population. Then, when they get their chance, they kill the child in the womb, or burden it with physical or mental defects...
...rise. People living near the plants will get more gamma rays through their gonads. So will people farther away, affected by radioactive by-products from the plants' exhausts. Possible result: more redheaded children will be born in black-haired families, and more mutations will lurk in the germ plasm to scandalize future neighbors...
...spontaneously-and can be changed artificially. His key chapter has the thundering Marxian title "The Liquidation of the Conservatism of the Nature of Organisms." He explains that a plant variety often gets into a rut. Thus, it tries to produce descendants exactly like itself. But buried in its germ plasm are characteristics which have been suppressed because they did not benefit the plant in its accustomed environment. All that is needed to bring these buried characteristics to light is to "liquidate the plant's conservatism...
...seems likely that, before becoming extinct, Neanderthal Man interbred with the more highly evolved men who supplanted and sometimes ate him. Dr. Hrdlicka thinks that many living people have Neanderthal blood in their veins (or more precisely, Neanderthal genes in their germ plasm), points to suspiciously Neanderthaloid features which crop out in 20th Century humans...