Word: slipping
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...were big enough to be trapped in fine porcelain filters, devised by Pasteur's assistant Charles Chamberland, and to be seen under the 19th century light microscope. It was a temperamental Dutch botanist, Martinus Beijerinck (1851-1931), who found that whatever caused mosaic disease in tobacco plants could slip through the minute pores of these filters. In 1897 he concluded that this infectious, filter-passing fluid was a "filterable virus." The word virus had been loosely used for centuries to denote any "poison" that caused infectious disease...
...years, the one clear mark of the virus was this ability to slip invisibly through porcelain filters. In those four decades, without waiting to see what a virus looked like, brilliant men did brilliant things about viruses and viral diseases. At Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Peyton Rous in 1910 proved that a filterable virus is the cause of sarcoma (a kind of cancer) in chickens. At Harvard and then at the Rockefeller Foundation, South Africa-born Max Theiler performed the delicate and dangerous feat of getting yellow-fever virus to grow in the brains of mice. With infinite...
...viruses were found to have horns or spikes. On some of these is an enzyme that can dissolve part of a cell's outer coating. Presumably, this is what the flu virus uses to open a hole in the cell-factory wall for its nucleic-acid core to slip through. A virus known as T2 bacteriophage (it attacks bacteria) was found to have a tadpole shape; the "tail" is like a coiled spring around a tiny hypodermic needle that stabs the cell wall, and through this the nucleic-acid core is injected. Micrographs show whether viruses are basically cubic...
...that in some unpredictable cases, a molecule of viral nucleic acid, without its protein overcoat, so closely resembles a gene that it can slip into the cell's chromosomal lineup, displacing a normal gene, and make the cell reproduce abnormally. Most of the resulting abnormal cells would probably die, but a few might retain the power to run wild and perpetuate themselves as cancer...
Lehmann did not slip by the Coast Guard boat until the finish line was about 25 yards away, but by doing so he raised Harvard's point score enough to swing the cumulative total...