My Science School

The Joseph Lister Memorial is a memorial to Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister by the sculptor Thomas Brock, situated in Portland Place in Marylebone, London. The memorial is positioned in the centre of the road opposite numbers 71 to 81 and is Grade II listed. It is close to Lister's home at 12 Park Crescent.

The memorial was unveiled by Sir John Bland-Sutton, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, on 13 March 1924. The base of the monument is made of grey Aberdeen granite. On top of the base is a bronze bust of Joseph Lister. At the front are the figures of a woman and a boy: the boy is holding a garland of flowers; the woman is pointing to Lister with her right hand.

Lister’s work had been largely misunderstood in England and the United States. Opposition was directed against his germ theory rather than against his “carbolic treatment.” The majority of practicing surgeons were unconvinced; while not antagonistic, they awaited clear proof that antisepsis constituted a major advance. Lister was not a spectacular operative surgeon and refused to publish statistics. Edinburgh, despite the ancient fame of its medical school, was regarded as a provincial centre. Lister understood that he must convince London before the usefulness of his work would be generally accepted.

His chance came in 1877, when he was offered the chair of Clinical Surgery at King’s College. On October 26, 1877, Lister, at King’s College Hospital, for the first time performed the then-revolutionary operation of wiring a fractured patella, or kneecap. It entailed the deliberate conversion of a simple fracture, carrying no risk to life, into a compound fracture, which often resulted in generalized infection and death. Lister’s proposal was widely publicized and aroused much opposition. Thus, the entire success of his operation carried out under antiseptic conditions forced surgical opinion throughout the world to accept that his method had added greatly to the safety of operative surgery.

More fortunate than many pioneers, Lister saw the almost universal acceptance of his principle during his working life. He retired from surgical practice in 1893, after the death of his wife in the previous year. Many honours came to him. Created a baronet in 1883, he was made Baron Lister of Lyme Regis in 1897 and appointed one of the 12 original members of the Order of Merit in 1902. He was a gentle, shy, unassuming man, firm in his purpose because he humbly believed himself to be directed by God. He was uninterested in social success or financial reward. In person he was handsome, with a fine athletic figure, fresh complexion, hazel eyes, and silver hair. For some years before his death, however, he was almost completely blind and deaf. Lister wrote no books but contributed many papers to professional journals. These are contained in The Collected Papers of Joseph, Baron Lister, 2 vol. (1909).

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After taking an arts course at University College, London, he enrolled in the faculty of medical science in October 1848. A brilliant student, he was graduated a bachelor of medicine with honours in 1852; in the same year he became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and house surgeon at University College Hospital. A visit to Edinburgh in the fall of 1853 led to Lister’s appointment as assistant to James Syme, the greatest surgical teacher of his day, and in October 1856 he was appointed surgeon to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In April he had married Syme’s eldest daughter. Lister, a deeply religious man, joined the Scottish Episcopal Church. The marriage, although childless, was a happy one, his wife entering fully into Lister’s professional life.

When three years later the Regius Professorship of Surgery at Glasgow University fell vacant, Lister was elected from seven applicants. In August 1861 he was appointed surgeon to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where he was in charge of wards in the new surgical block. The managers hoped that hospital disease (now known as operative sepsis—infection of the blood by disease-producing microorganisms) would be greatly decreased in their new building. The hope proved vain, however. Lister reported that, in his Male Accident Ward, between 45 and 50 percent of his amputation cases died from sepsis between 1861 and 1865.

In this ward Lister began his experiments with antisepsis. Much of his earlier published work had dealt with the mechanism of coagulation of the blood and role of the blood vessels in the first stages of inflammation. Both researches depended upon the microscope and were directly connected with the healing of wounds. Lister had already tried out methods to encourage clean healing and had formed theories to account for the prevalence of sepsis. Discarding the popular concept of miasma—direct infection by bad air—he postulated that sepsis might be caused by a pollen-like dust. There is no evidence that he believed this dust to be living matter, but he had come close to the truth. It is therefore all the more surprising that he became acquainted with the work of the bacteriologist Louis Pasteur only in 1865.

Pasteur had arrived at his theory that microorganisms cause fermentation and disease by experiments on fermentation and putrefaction. Lister’s education and his familiarity with the microscope, the process of fermentation, and the natural phenomena of inflammation and coagulation of the blood impelled him to accept Pasteur’s theory as the full revelation of a half-suspected truth. At the start he believed the germs were carried solely by the air. This incorrect opinion proved useful, for it obliged him to adopt the only feasible method of surgically clean treatment. In his attempt to interpose an antiseptic barrier between the wound and the air, he protected the site of operation from infection by the surgeon’s hands and instruments. He found an effective antiseptic in carbolic acid, which had already been used as a means of cleansing foul-smelling sewers and had been empirically advised as a wound dressing in 1863. Lister first successfully used his new method on August 12, 1865; in March 1867 he published a series of cases. The results were dramatic. Between 1865 and 1869, surgical mortality fell from 45 to 15 percent in his Male Accident Ward.

In 1869, Lister succeeded Syme in the chair of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh. There followed the seven happiest years of his life when, largely as the result of German experiments with antisepsis during the Franco-German War, his clinics were crowded with visitors and eager students. In 1875 Lister made a triumphal tour of the leading surgical centres in Germany. The next year he visited America but was received with little enthusiasm except in Boston and New York City.

Credit : Britannica 

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Joseph Lister was a British medical scientist and a pioneer in preventive medicine. He was the founder of antiseptic medicine, which helped prevent infection during and after surgery. His antisepsis principles laid the foundation of modern infection control Joseph Lister was born in 1827 in Essex, now in London, into a prosperous family. His father Joseph Jackson Lister was a wine merchant and an amateur physicist and microscopist. His discovery led to the modern achromatic microscope.

Soon after graduating in medicine in 1852, Lister became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and house surgeon at University College Hospital in London. In 1861, he was appointed surgeon to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where he was in charge of wards in the surgical block. At that time, wound infections were a common occurrence that frequently killed patients. Doctors did not then realise that patients were dying of operative sepsis, an infection of the blood by disease-producing microorganisms. Between 1861 and 1865 alone, Lister noted that about 50% of his amputation cases died (from sepsis).

Eureka moment

Lister’s moment of realisation came when he read about Louis Pasteur’s research onputrefaction. He realised that the process behind fermentation might also be involved with wound infection. In his ward, Lister began his experiments with antisepsis. He found an effective antiseptic in carbolic acid, which had already been used as a means of cleansing sewers and had been empirically advised as a wound dressing in 1863. This proved extremely effective at preventing sepsis and gangrene. Lister first successfully used his new method in 1865, and in 1867, published a series of cases. The sepsis cases in his ward came down drastically. His recommendations met with some resistance in the medical profession, but eventually came to revolutionise surgery.

Many firsts

Lister also has many firsts to his credit. He was the first person to isolate bacteria in pure culture (Bacillus lactis) using liquid cultures containing either Pasteur’s solution. Lister also pioneered the use of catgut and rubber tubing for wound drainage. He also showed that urine could be kept sterile after boiling in swan-necked flasks.

In 1883 Queen Victoria made him a Baronet, of Park Crescent in the Parish of St Marylebone in the County of Middlesex. He was appointed one of the 12 original members of the Order of Merit in 1902. Lister is one of the two surgeons in the United Kingdom who have the honour of having a public monument in London. Lister's stands in Portland Place.

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Flossie Wong-Staal was a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist who cloned human immunodeficiency virus (HM) for the first time. She determined the function of its genes, a significant step in our understanding and treatment of HIV/AIDS. Flossie Wong-Staal (original name Yee Ching Wong) was born in 1947 in China. She attended an all-girls Catholic school in Hong Kong, where she excelled academically. Her teachers and parents encouraged her to take up science, although her interest lay in literature. However, she pursued science and began to love it.

In Wong-Staal went to the United States to study bacteriology at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA), She earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology from UCLA in 1972.

Research into retroviruses In 1973, she began her research into retroviruses along with Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute. Retroviruses are a group of viruses that infect their victims by inserting their genetic material into the host's DNA. Wong-Staal was part of the group that identified the first human retrovirus, human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1). The team showed that the retrovirus could cause cancer, a stance long dismissed by the research community.

In the early 1980s, when AIDS cases first began appearing in the United States, Wong-Staal and Gallo quickly set about finding the cause and they succeeded in 1983. The duo, along with Luc Montagnier in France, simultaneously discovered that HIV, a retrovirus, was the cause of AIDS. In 1985, Wong-Staal became the first researcher to clone HIV. It led to the first genetic mapping of the virus, which aided in the development of blood tests for HIV.

Other scientific contributions Wong-Staal's research into the Tat protein within the viral strain HIV-1 led to the development of new treatments for Kaposi's sarcoma, a type of skin lesion, affecting HIV/AIDS patients.

In 1990, Wong-Staal joined the University of California San Diego, where she led the Center for AIDS Research and investigated gene therapy as a treatment for HIV/AIDS.

Wong Staal died of pneumonia (not related to coronavirus) in 2020 at the age of 73.

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In 1923, W.H. Bragg left for the Royal Institution in London and Kathleen went with him. It was around this time that X-ray crystallography began to be used to look inside organic molecules — carbon atoms with other elemental atoms attached. The process involved a lot of calculations, and Kathleen saw the need for crystallography look-up tables that would greatly speed things up. Together with her lab-mate, they created the Astbury-Yardley tables, which formed the basis for what became the International Tables for X-ray Crystallography.

While at the Royal Institution, Kathleen met Thomas Lonsdale, an engineering student who would become her husband. They married in 1927 and then moved to Leeds to accommodate his new job. Meanwhile, Kathleen joined the University of Leeds’ physics department and worked on X-ray diffraction.

It was at the University of Leeds that Kathleen made a name for herself. Chemists had been arguing about the atomic structure of benzene for decades. In 1865, chemist August Keuklé had a dream that included a vision of the structure of benzene. He saw atoms dancing around and transforming into an ouroboros — a serpent swallowing its own tail. Kathleen was given hexamethylbenzene crystals to study, and in 1929 she was able to prove conclusively that the benzene molecule is in fact a flat ring. This was a remarkable achievement, especially considering that all the calculations had to be done by hand. And as if that wasn’t enough of a contribution, Kathleen was also the first to apply Fourier methods to X-ray pattern analysis as she solved the structure for another type of benzene — hexachlorobenzene.

Kathleen’s first child, Jane, arrived later that same year. The family soon moved back to London and had two more children in 1931 and 1934 — Nancy and Stephen. Although moving and raising children greatly disrupted Kathleen’s work, she kept her head in the crystallography game, doing calculations of structure factors by hand whenever she had the time. Soon, Sir Bragg shared good news: he’d been given an allowance so that Kathleen could hire a nanny and come back to work at the Royal Institution.

When Kathleen returned, there were no X-ray instruments available to her. She was able to secure a large electromagnet instead, so she pursued another interest — determining the magnetic properties of benzene-like compounds known as aromatics. By doing this, she was able to establish proof of molecular orbitals, but another chemist, Linus Pauling, beat her to publication.

Credit : Hack a Day

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Kathleen Lonsdale was an Irish crystallographer and a pioneer in the use of X-rays to study crystals. Using X-ray diffraction, she proved that the benzene ring is flat.

Kathleen Lonsdale was born in 1903 in Newbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. She studied at Woodford County High School for Girls. She excelled in mathematics and science. However, she had to attend classes in physics, chemistry and mathematics at the boys' high school because the girls school didn't offer these subjects. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Bedford College for Women in 1922, graduating in physics with an M.Sc. from University College London in 1924. In 1924, she joined the crystallography research team headed by William Henry Bragg at the Royal Institution. Bragg was a pioneer of X-ray diffraction. After her marriage, she moved to the University of Leeds Department of Physics, where she continued to work on X-ray diffraction and studied the structure of benzene. In 1929, her results showed that the benzene ring was flat, something that chemists had been arguing about for 60 years. She developed an X-ray technique to obtain the accurate measurement (to seven figures) of the distance between carbon atoms in diamond. She also applied crystallographic techniques to medical problems.

She became professor of chemistry at University College, London, in 1949. In 1956, she was made Dame of the British Empire

During her career she attained several firsts for female scientists, including being one of the first two women elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1945 (along with bacterial chemist Marjory Stephenson), first woman tenured professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union of Crystallography, and first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Carolus Linnaeus is one of the giants of natural science. He devised the formal two-part naming system we use to classify all lifeforms.

A well-known example of his two-part system is the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex; another is our own species Homo sapiens.

Linnaeus pushed the science of biology to new heights by describing and classifying our own human species in precisely the same way as he classified other lifeforms. Other people at the time demanded that humans must be regarded as a special case in biology, different from animals.

Carolus Linnaeus was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1761 and took the nobleman’s name of Carl von Linne.

He died at the age of 70, on 10 January, 1778, after suffering a stroke. He was survived by his wife Sara, and five children. Two of the couple’s other children died when they were very young.

Linnaeus died on his farm about 6 miles (10 km) from Uppsala. He had bought the farm 20 years before his death. The farm was called Hammarby. Linnaeus cultivated his own private gardens at Hammarby and had hoped to be buried there. In fact he was buried in Uppsala.

Today Hammarby is a museum which features exhibitions of Linnaeus’s work, his botanical collections, and a garden and a park where his love of the natural world is reflected.

Credit : Famous Scientists 

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A few days after arriving in the Dutch town of Harderwijk in May 1735, Linnaeus completed his examinations and received his medical degree following the submission of a thesis he had prepared in advance on the topic of intermittent fevers. Linnaeus and Sohlberg then journeyed to Leiden, where Linnaeus sought patronage for the publication of his numerous manuscripts. He was immediately successful, and his Systema Naturae (“The System of Nature”) was published only a few months later with financial support from Jan Frederik Gronovius, senator of Leiden, and Isaac Lawson, a Scottish physician. This folio volume of only 11 pages presented a hierarchical classification, or taxonomy, of the three kingdoms of nature: stones, plants, and animals. Each kingdom was subdivided into classes, orders, genera, species, and varieties. This hierarchy of taxonomic ranks replaced traditional systems of biological classification that were based on mutually exclusive divisions, or dichotomies. Linnaeus’s classification system has survived in biology, though additional ranks, such as families, have been added to accommodate growing numbers of species.

In particular, it was the botanical section of Systema Naturae that built Linnaeus’s scientific reputation. After reading essays on sexual reproduction in plants by Vaillant and by German botanist Rudolph Jacob Camerarius, Linnaeus had become convinced of the idea that all organisms reproduce sexually. As a result, he expected each plant to possess male and female sexual organs (stamens and pistils), or “husbands and wives,” as he also put it. On this basis, he designed a simple system of distinctive characteristics to classify each plant. The number and position of the stamens, or husbands, determined the class to which it belonged, whereas the number and position of pistils, or wives, determined the order. This “sexual system,” as Linnaeus called it, became extremely popular, though certainly not only because of its practicality but also because of its erotic connotations and its allusions to contemporary gender relations. French political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the system for his “Huit lettres elementaires sur la botanique a Madame Delessert” (1772; “Eight Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to Madame Delessert”). English physician Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, used Linnaeus’s sexual system for his poem “The Botanic Garden” (1789), which caused an uproar among contemporaries for its explicit passages.

Credit : Britannica 

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Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who devised the binomial classification system, a two-part naming system to identify, classify and name organisms from bacteria to elephant. Carl Linnaeus is often called the Father of Taxonomy. His classification, which formed the foundation of our modern taxonomic system, uses the dual "genus, species," nomenclature to classify organisms. Linnaeus was born in the province of Smaland in Sweden in 1707. His father, a pastor and an amateur botanist, instilled a love of nature in Linnaeus. Carl Linnaeus studied medicine and science at the University of Lund and later in Uppsala University. At the time, training in botany was part of the medical curriculum, as doctors had to prescribe drugs derived from medicinal plants. But memorising scientific plant names was difficult - each plant was known by a long description in Latin.

Carl Linnaeus was keen on finding a way to name species better. In 1732, he travelled to Lapland, in the far north of Sweden, on a six-month long research expedition sponsored by the Uppsala Academy of Sciences. He collected some 400 species of new plants. He made observations of the native plants and birds. All Swedish medical students were required to receive their degrees outside Sweden, so Linnaeus finished his studies at the University of Harderwijk in the Netherlands in 1735. His doctorate was focused on the causes of malaria.

The same year, Carl Linnaeus published his pivotal work of Systema Naturae ("The System of Nature"). He had laid the groundwork for this first edition in a series of manuscripts written over the years. Systema Naturae proposed a radical new approach to the ordering and classification of plants and animals. His system was hierarchically ranked. Organisms were grouped based on morphological traits. At the broadest level, the classification system was divided into three broad kingdoms: animals, plants and minerals (the mineral designation was subsequently dropped). These categories were further subdivided into "classes," "orders," "genera," and "species."

Linnaeus continued to revise Systema Naturae throughout his lifetime. It eventually grew from 11 pages in the first edition to more than 2,000 pages, as new species were added over time. In 1739 he was among the founders of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Linnaeus spent many years teaching at Uppsala University. Linnaeus was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1761 and took the nobleman's name of Carl von Linne.

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When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, nuclear research was consolidated to some degree. Fermi had built a series of “piles,” as he called them, at Columbia. Now he moved to the University of Chicago, where he continued to construct piles in a space under the stands of the football field. The final structure, a flattened sphere about 7.5 metres (25 feet) in diameter, contained 380 tons of graphite blocks as the moderator and 6 tons of uranium metal and 40 tons of uranium oxide as the fuel, distributed in a careful pattern. The pile went “critical” on December 2, 1942, proving that a nuclear reaction could be initiated, controlled, and stopped. Chicago Pile-1, as it was called, was the first prototype for several large nuclear reactors constructed at Hanford, Washington, where plutonium, a man-made element heavier than uranium, was produced. Plutonium also could fission and thus was another route to the atomic bomb.

Since the war, science had been recognized in the United States as highly important to national security. Fermi largely avoided politics, but he did agree to serve on the General Advisory Committee (GAC), which counseled the five commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission. In response to the revelation in September 1949 that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb, many Americans urged the government to try to construct a thermonuclear bomb, which can be orders of magnitude more powerful. GAC was publicly unanimous in opposing this step, mostly on technical grounds, with Fermi and Isidor Rabi going further by introducing an ethical question into so-called “objective” advice. Such a bomb, they wrote, “becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide…. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman decided otherwise, and a loyal Fermi went for a time back to Los Alamos to assist in the development of fusion weapons, however with the hope that they might prove impossible to construct.

Fermi primarily investigated subatomic particles, particularly pi mesons and muons, after returning to Chicago. He was also known as a superb teacher, and many of his lectures are still in print. During his later years he raised a question now known as the Fermi paradox: “Where is everybody?” He was asking why no extraterrestrial civilizations seemed to be around to be detected, despite the great size and age of the universe. He pessimistically thought that the answer might involve nuclear annihilation.

Credit : Britannica 

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When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, nuclear research was consolidated to some degree. Fermi had built a series of “piles,” as he called them, at Columbia. Now he moved to the University of Chicago, where he continued to construct piles in a space under the stands of the football field. The final structure, a flattened sphere about 7.5 metres (25 feet) in diameter, contained 380 tons of graphite blocks as the moderator and 6 tons of uranium metal and 40 tons of uranium oxide as the fuel, distributed in a careful pattern. The pile went “critical” on December 2, 1942, proving that a nuclear reaction could be initiated, controlled, and stopped. Chicago Pile-1, as it was called, was the first prototype for several large nuclear reactors constructed at Hanford, Washington, where plutonium, a man-made element heavier than uranium, was produced. Plutonium also could fission and thus was another route to the atomic bomb.

In 1944 Fermi became an American citizen and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where physicist J. Robert Oppenheimerled the Manhattan Project’s laboratory, whose mission was to fashion weapons out of the rare uranium-235 isotope and plutonium. Fermi was an associate director of the lab and headed one of its divisions. When the first plutonium bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, Fermi ingeniously made a rough calculation of its explosive energy by noting how far slips of paper were blown from the vertical.

After the war ended, Fermi accepted a permanent position at the University of Chicago, where he influenced another distinguished group of physicists, including Harold Agnew, Owen Chamberlin, Geoffrey Chew, James Cronin, Jerome Friedman, Richard Garwin, Murray Gell-Mann, Marvin Goldberger, Tsung-Dao Lee, Jack Steinberger, and Chen Ning Yang. As in Rome, Fermi recognized that his current pursuits, now in nuclear physics, were approaching a condition of maturity. He thus redirected his sights on reactions at higher energies, a field called elementary particle physics, or high-energy physics.

Credit :  Britannica 

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