Word: wonder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Storey Mountain (TIME, Oct. 11), by the same young Trappist monk. Both books are the work of 34-year-old Thomas Merton, who has retired from the world to live under a monastic rule so strict that it forbids even the self-indulgence of talking. Trendspotters have begun to wonder whether some of the U.S. reading public, in its search for peace, subconsciously wishes it could follow...
When dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was first offered to the general public in 1945, the U.S. Army and Public Health Service warned that the wonder insecticide had better be used cautiously. No one knew much about DDT's long-range effect on human beings or on the balance of nature...
Theoretically, modern medicine might be called the "age of antibiotics." Actually, the new wonder drugs (like neomycin, see below) have been comparatively scarce and expensive because they had to be grown, slowly and tediously, from molds. Last week Detroit's Parke, Davis & Co. made a dramatic announcement: the first practical synthetic production of an important antibiotic, chloromycetin. The process means that chloromycetin will be quickly and cheaply available for any doctor. It may also point the way to mass production of other antibiotics...
People are always asking greying Microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman, 60, how he discovered the wonder drug streptomycin in 1943. Modest Dr. Waksman (rhymes with phlox-man) has a stock answer which makes it sound pretty simple. He merely examined about 10,000 cultures, he explains. Only 1,000 would kill bacteria in preliminary tests; only 100 looked promising in later tests; only ten were isolated and described; one of the ten proved to be streptomycin. It just happened that streptomycin was the first effective drug that doctors had ever found to fight tuberculosis...
...wonder that, years later, Shaw was to find his niche in the Fabian Society -"a minority of cultural snobs" who, he says, standing haughtily apart from the English proletariat, permeated the governing class and helped utterly to change the face of Britain...