"KINGSTON, R.I. — In a basement laboratory at the University of Rhode Island, adult deer ticks are taped onto their backs, legs flailing. For about an hour, the watermelon-seed-sized ticks continuously drool into a miniature glass tube.
If research assistant Megan Dyer is lucky, she may get the equivalent of a tiny raindrop in tick saliva by the time she is finished with the three-dozen ticks.
Bizarre as the work seems, it’s part of a serious two-decade effort by URI professor and tick expert Tom Mather to develop a vaccine against tick-borne diseases that would make people itch as soon as a deer tick bites."
http://www.bostonglobe.com/
