Small Talk

Science's sharpest eye is the electron microscope. It sees with a fine-grained beam of electrons instead of coarse-grained light. Last week the Electron Microscope Society of America met in Philadelphia to talk about a few little things they had seen:

P: Drs. E. DeRobertis and F. O. Schmitt of Massachusetts Institute of Technology had seen the insides of nerve fibers. Each fiber looked like a telephone cable, full of parallel threads about one half-millionth of an inch thick. Human nerves and the nerves of frogs, lobsters and squids are all made in this way.

P: Dr. James Hillier of the Radio Corporation of America displayed electron pictures of parasitic viruses attacking bacteria. The viruses (one four-hundred-millionth of an inch in diameter) looked like tadpoles with skinny tails and bodies. They penetrate the cell wall of the larger bacterium until they fill the whole cell.

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