Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Stealthy Viruses. This concept of the DNA molecule has started a vast amount of excited work. Mathematicians are trying to break its four-symbol code. Chemists are trying to dig deeper into its structure. All sorts of biologists are looking for effects of DNA on the behavior of living organisms, and they are finding a wealth of strange things. Loose DNA can penetrate certain bacteria, changing them permanently into a new strain. Many viruses are packets of DNA wrapped in a coat of protein. When a virus infects a living cell, it leaves its coat outside. The DNA enters...
Sometimes a virus enters a cell and makes it multiply over and over, even if its unruly growth kills the animal of which the cell is a part. Several kinds of animal cancer are caused by such viruses, whose DNA presumably takes command and makes the cells multiply wildly...
Anticancer Orders. Some geneticists think that many if not all kinds of cancer are caused by invading viruses. Others think not. But all agree that the genetics of cancer-causing viruses and cells that are their victims is a promising road toward the cure or prevention of cancer. If cancer cells multiply wildly because the DNA of a virus is giving them orders, it may be possible to countermand those orders with another kind of DNA. Knowledge about DNA may also help prevent some kinds of radiation damage...
...They laughed when I sat down at my test tubes." That is how the - University of California's Nobel-prizewinning Virologist Wendell M. Stanley might have begun his San Francisco lecture. For many physicians thought that Stanley had gone much too far when he suggested that viruses, or virus-like particles, might be responsible for all forms of cancer. But in support of his hypothesis, Stanley last week marshaled a phalanx of evidence from more than a dozen high-powered researchers as well as from his own laboratories...
...real puzzler: viruses are closely related to the genes that determine inherited characteristics-so closely that they have been dubbed "naked genes." This may help explain what some researchers regard as inherited tendencies to cancer. Concluded Stanley: "The time has come when we should change our thinking about cancer-virus relationships...