Word: plastic
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Unsterile Needles. Metals are still harder to deal with, especially the 1.2 billion disposable stainless steel needles attached to plastic syringes that are now used each year in the U.S. Of this total, nearly 800 million are used in hospitals, almost 200 million by diabetics giving themselves insulin, as many more by doctors and nurses in their offices, and the remainder by nursing homes, researchers and veterinarians...
...about one two-hundredth of an ounce) of Pu-238 into a capsule of platinum and tantalum. The Americans put 500 mg. (one-sixtieth of an ounce) in their capsule. In both devices, the patient is sufficiently shielded from the heat of the radioactive source by its plastic container. That heat is directed to a thermocouple that generates 200 milliwatts of electricity. This powers a tiny generator that sends an impulse to the heart through internally implanted wires. Both of the complex pacemakers are small. The French device is cylindrical and about the size of a 35-mm. film cassette...
Splendor of Numbers. There are tranquilizers in the water supply and Sleep Days to smudge the memory of a disorderly but more vital past. Blasted trees and frazzled grass have been replaced by plastic imitations. Numbers have replaced words as the most artful means of expression. Says Mr. Colin Monk, an H.D.A. administrator: "How I admire the immunity of numbers, their untouchability, their inaccessibility: every moment they shine, newly bathed, concealing, never acknowledging the dark work they...
...doubt. As Miss Frame expresses it in the poetry that threads the novel: "It is the company of weather I crave in this weatherless room/the thermometer reads me only." In the Waipori of the future, the problem of establishing existence would be even more terrifying. If a plastic tree topples into the vinyl grass, does it make a sound if the forest is not electronically bugged...
Guillet's team got around such problems by finding a way to chemically bond groups of "sensitized" molecules directly into the plastic's carbon chain. When these "S" groups absorb ultraviolet light from direct sunlight, he says, their carbon "backbones" soon begin to be decomposed by microorganisms. But indoors-even in front of glass windows-they will not be affected. Guillet claims that the speed of the breakdown can be controlled by varying the number of "S" groups bonded into the plastic molecules. He also thinks that the process would raise the price of plastics by only...