Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Science

  • Doubled edged shield

    Adil Menon Cleveland, Ohio, United States Working my way through a biography of pioneering vaccine developer Maurice Hilleman titled Vaccinated, I was struck by how often the researchers of his era, such as Jonas Salk, tested their vaccines both on their own children as well as on children with cognitive challenges. If indeed the latter were…

  • Absinthe: The green fairy

    Nicolás Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain “After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”—Oscar Wilde Absinthe is a spirit with very high alcohol…

  • Kathleen (Yardley) Lonsdale DSc., FR

    JMS PearceHull, England Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971) (Fig 1) like her contemporary Dorothy Hodgkin was one of the women pioneers in a man’s world of professional scientists.1 She developed original techniques in X-ray diffraction of crystals to determine the structure of a molecule. This led to studies of the benzene ring, structure of drugs, and investigations…

  • Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM, FRS (1910-1994)

    JMS PearceHull, England Dorothy Hodgkin (Fig 1), though not by religion, had close Quaker affinities through her marriage and through her spirited pacifism. She possessed a unique mixture of scientific skills that allowed her to extend the use of X-rays to reveal the structures of compounds, a technical venture far more complex than anything attempted…

  • John Dalton

    JMS PearceHull, England John Dalton (1766–1844) (Fig 1) is one of the most revered scientists of the last 250 years. His origins were humble. He was the son of Deborah and Joseph Dalton, a weaver, both members of the Society of Friends. He was born in a thatched cottage in Eaglesfield near Cockermouth in the…

  • Terminal digit preference

    Marshall Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States Numbers that end in zero motivate and energize people. Recall Y2K, when the world celebrated on January 1, 2000. The irresistibility of zeros resulted in everyone celebrating on the wrong date: the new millennium started on January 1, 2001, not 2000. The first year of the Julian calendar in…

  • The Doctors Cori, carbohydrate metabolism, and the Nobel prize

    Energy in animals and humans is stored in the body in the form of glycogen. Starch, a similar molecule but less branched, serves the same function in plants. Glycogen, discovered by Claude Bernard in 1856, is stored primarily in the liver (about 120 grams) and in muscle (about 400 grams), and to a lesser amount…

  • Roget and his Thesaurus

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK There was much more to Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)(Fig 1) than his indispensable Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Fig 2).1 But little is remembered of his illustrious career in medicine and scientific discovery, which is surprising since in these endeavors he was highly regarded in his time.2 This may stem…

  • Thomas Henry Huxley

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration . . . In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”– TH Huxley Above a butcher’s shop in Ealing in…

  • The first description of DNA: A six million dollar letter from Francis to Michael Crick

    Marshall Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States In the April 25, 1953 issue of the biomedical journal Nature, three articles were published on the structural characteristics of DNA. One was a three-dimensional model of DNA constructed by James Watson and Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, who did no experiments to arrive at their…