Medicine: Lost & Found

Amid the usual bacteriologist's clutter on Dr. Frederick G. Novy's laboratory bench at Ann Arbor was an unidentified virus which killed rats swiftly. Dr. Novy knew little more about it, but he had 25 test tubes of the virus, flourishing in rat blood. Then he moved his work from one lab to another and the test tubes vanished. That was in 1920, and ever since, Dr. Novy has longed to know what happened to the virus. As the years passed, he was more & more sure of one thing: if the tubes were ever found, the virus would be dead.

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