Word: snaked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Davis and Wright watched while other Red units began lobbing white phosphorus shells along the road and lacing it with heavy automatic fire. Then three U.S. tanks rumbled down the road and began blasting away at the same crag lately tenanted by Bob Davis, Jimmy Wright and the green snake...
...Davis: "We didn't ask him why, because we never know about those things." Davis and Wright fought their way back up the hill; it was straight up. They reached the top after dark and settled in their old hole. This time, they said, they found no green snake...
Philpot bought a dozen king snakes and, with the help of his pharmacology professor, Dr. Ralph G. Smith, set about extracting a serum which would be harmless in itself and still neutralize the venom of rattlers and moccasins. The first difficulty was to get enough blood out of a king snake. Eventually, Philpot hit upon the simple idea of cutting off the snakes' tails. In this way, he got as much as 40 cc of blood from a five-foot snake and 20 cc or more of serum from the blood...
Instead of exposing himself to deadly snakes to test the serum, Philpot bought rattlesnake and moccasin venom in powdered form. Then he went to work on mice. He found that a mouse could be injected with 2½ to 3½ times the lethal dose of viper venom, and still survive if promptly given an injection of king snake serum. Better yet, he found that his king snake extract was three to four times more effective than a commercial preparation made, by a far more difficult process, from the blood of venom-injected horses...
...beginning an internship at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, and Dr. Smith reported the findings in the current Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. They did not expect the work to found a major business in snakebite cures: the U.S. has only about 2,000 cases of snake bite a year. But there seemed to be no reason why men, as well as mice, should not benefit from the king snake's natural immunity...