Category: Science
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Opium and its derivatives
Humans have taken psychotropic drugs since time immemorial, for pleasure and for pain. Opium was used by the Sumerians during the Neolithic era and mentioned in the Egyptian Papyrus Ebers and in ancient Chinese manuscripts. It was prescribed by the Greek and Roman physicians, by Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny, Celsus, and Galen. The Roman emperor Marcus…
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An ode to the cloaca
Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United StatesAnant Radhakrishnan Amarillo, Texas, United States The term cloaca was first used around 600 BC by the Romans who named their main drainage channel the “Cloaca Maxima” or the Greatest Sewer. It drained the local marshes and all water and effluent from Rome into the Tiber River. They continued expanding it so…
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Historical and modern diagnoses of Darwin’s chronic illness
Stephen KentWarrington, United Kingdom Introduction Charles Darwin has been the subject of intense study over the last 140 years, not only because of his publication of The Origin of Species through Natural Selection, but also because his extensive correspondence gives a clear insight into the character of the man himself. One of his preoccupations in…
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Justus von Liebig (1803–1873)
Philip LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States An extraordinary chemist, Justus von Liebig influenced the development of organic chemistry, scientific teaching of chemistry, and the application of chemistry to physiology and agriculture. He was one of the forerunners of the German educators who influenced the evolution to the outstanding scientific and educational standards of the late nineteenth…
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Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882)
When the proteins of the human body are broken down to their constituent amino acids, they are converted to ammonia (NH3), which, being toxic, is metabolized in the liver to urea. As the main nitrogenous end product of proteins, urea is found mainly in the blood, but to some extent also in bile, milk, and…
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Did Scythian men feminize themselves by drinking mare’s urine?
Andrew WilliamsLeicester, United Kingdom The Enarees were nomadic Scythian soothsayers who lived within the areas bounded by the rivers Danube, Bug, Don, and Dnieper, and who Herodotus in the 5th century AD asserted were effeminate.1,2 Unfortunately the Scythians did not leave any written records. Hippocrates’ Airs Water and Places XX11 using the term Anarieis related…
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Max Planck on innovation and age
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Max Planck (1858–1947) was born in Kiel, Germany, to an educated family. He earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1879 from the University of Munich. His quantum theory, in which he postulated that energy is released in discrete units and not continuously, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck’s work…
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Will DNA be the next invisible ink?
Edward TaborBethesda, Maryland, United States Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical that forms our genes, can be used to encode and transmit narrative documents and photos, as shown in several published studies. DNA might also become the next “invisible ink” because messages in DNA can be “hidden in plain sight” to reduce the chance of being…
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Fred Gey, father of the antioxidant hypothesis
Alun EvansBelfast, United Kingdom Fred Gey was a German scientist who developed the concept that antioxidant vitamin deficiency caused certain diseases. He qualified as an MD at the University of Basel in 1952, having first researched clinical biochemistry. He then spent two years in the biochemistry section of the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany,…
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Chemical origins of terrestrial biology
David GreenChicago, Illinois, United States As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, I attended a lecture by Harold C. Urey, a Nobel laureate. The subject of his lecture was the origin of life, and he described an experiment that he and his graduate student, Stanley Miller, had performed at the University…