For Garrison Keillor, who grew up a gangly, awkward boy with "a powerful wish to be invisible", the fictional prairie town of Lake Wobegon serves this role.
For example, an enzyme called nucleoside phosphorylase serves this role when cells switch to synthesizing nucleotides from recycled purines instead of from new starting materials.
In the nineteenth century, the bosses of political machines served this role; in the twentieth, it was media barons, especially in broadcasting and newspapers; in the twenty-first, it is people who have created vast online social networks.
Typically, private foundations serve this role, and with their support many organizations run innovative and results-oriented programs where a return on investment, in the form of improvements in the lives of the program participants, is built into the project.
This article will discuss a number of surrogate endpoints that are likely candidates to serve this role.
Observations such as these led to the conclusion that Pax6 is a "master control gene" responsible for eye formation and that it has served this role at least since the last common ancestor of insects and vertebrates.
Some serve this role better than others -- and some serve it too well.
The Office served this role for me for a long time... before that, I suppose it was Seinfeld, and even Thirty Something.
Imidazol was identified as a substance that can serve this role.
We conclude that none of these tests reveal any distinguishing predisposition toward a role in NO scavenging for the hxHbs, but that any hemoglobin could likely serve this role in the presence of a mechanism for heme iron re-reduction.
