My Science School

In earlier days a common ailment like a sore throat could kill a patient. It was known that bacteria like streptococcus caused illnesses but no medication was available to fight them.

Then in 1932, a German chemist and pathologist named Gerhard Domagk discovered that a red azo dye of low toxicity, prevented death in mice infected by streptococci bacteria. It was soon found that this dye could help in combating bacterial infections including diseases like meningitis and post-partum sepsis.

The only problem with this new drug was that it turned the skin a bright red! Further research showed that the drug could be split into two parts and the part that killed the streptococci infection was colourless. It was named Prontosil and belongs to a family of drugs called ‘sulphanilamides’ which are still in use today.

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The discovery of Penicillin heralded the dawn of the antibiotic age in medicine. Before Penicillin it was common for a patient to die of blood poisoning from a simple cut or from infections like pneumonia. Penicillin was the first true broad-spectrum antibiotic and its discovery was based on a lucky mistake!

In September of 1928, a Scottish microbiologist named Alexander Fleming forgot to clear away some petri dishes containing colonies of staphylococcus bacteria. He noticed that one dish was clear around the area where a mould was growing. It was as if the mould had secreted something that inhibited bacterial growth.

Fleming found that this mould was capable of killing a wide range of harmful bacteria and called the substance Penicillin. He delegated the job of isolating pure Penicillin from the mould to his assistants Stuart Craddock and Frederick Ridley. This task proved rather tricky and it was only by 1943 that drug companies began mass-producing Penicillin. It soon became the wonder drug of the century and Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1945 for his fortuitous mistake!

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An electron microscope uses an electron beam instead of a beam of light to illuminate an object. While an ordinary microscope may magnify an object up to 2,000 times, an electron microscope can magnify an object up to 2 million times!

In 1931, Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska, two German electrical engineers, devised a two-lens electron microscope. They found that if a beam of electrons was passed through a magnetic field, it behaved in the same way as a beam of light did when it passed through the lens of a microscope. The only difference was that in the first case the object under study was magnified many more times.

Many technical improvements were made to the electron microscope till it became the highly sophisticated instrument it is today.

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Electroencephalography is the process of recording and interpreting the electrical activity of the brain. The instrument used to do this is called an electroencephalograph and the resultant recording is called an electroencephalogram (EEG).

The first EEG reading was published in 1929, by a German scientist named Hans Berger. Hans Berger’s use of a string galvanometer was inspired by the electrocardiogram machine invented by Willem Einthoven.

In his initial experiments Berger exposed the surface of a dog’s brain and measured electrical currents in the outer part of its brain. Later, he placed electrodes under the scalp of humans who had part of their skulls removed during brain operations. He was able to record brain waves through the skull and collected EEGs from family, friends and other volunteers.

Berger identified two kinds of brain activity which he called ‘alpha waves’ and ‘beta waves’. EEGs show different patterns of brain waves during activities such as thinking, resting and sleeping.

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Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas. It helps to balance the level of sugar in the blood. Diabetes occurs when the body does not use insulin properly or does not make enough insulin.

A person with diabetes needs insulin to break down sugar into energy. Without insulin a person with diabetes would not have much time to live. For thousands of years, a diabetes diagnosis meant wasting away to a certain death.

Before the discovery of insulin, the only treatment that was given to diabetes patients was to put them on strict diets with a minimal carbohydrate intake. Even then, the prognosis was bleak.

In 1889, Oskar Minkowski and Josef von Mering discovered that when the pancreas gland was removed from dogs, the animals displayed symptoms of diabetes and died soon. This gave rise to the idea that the pancreas made a substance that prevented diabetes. This substance was named insulin by Sir Edward Albert Sharpey in 1910. In 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best harvested insulin from a dog’s pancreas and used this to keep another severely diabetic dog alive for 70 days.

In 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying from diabetes made a spectacular recovery when he received the first insulin injection in a Toronto hospital. Following this, mass production of insulin began and almost overnight, the prognosis for millions of people suffering from diabetes went from fatal to good!

While insulin is not a cure for diabetes, it helps to manage it. This medical discovery has saved and continues to save millions of lives worldwide.

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Chemotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses chemical substances to destroy cancer cells in the body. These drugs are called ‘cytotoxic’, which means that they are toxic to the body’s cells. Chemotherapy is sometimes used to treat other diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and has side effects like loss of hair and nails, nausea and a weakened immune system.

The term ‘chemotherapy’ was first coined by Nobel Laureate Paul Ehrlich in the early 1900s and means the use of chemicals to treat diseases (chemo+therapy).

The story of chemotherapy began during World War I and II, when mustard gas was used as an agent during chemical warfare. It was discovered during a military operation that a group of people who were accidentally exposed to mustard gas showed very low white blood cell counts.

It was reasoned that an agent that could damage rapidly growing white blood cells, may have a similar effect on cancer cells which also grow rapidly.

Consequently in the 1940s, several patients with advanced cancers of certain white blood cells were administered the drug. The improvement was remarkable. This experience led researchers to look for other substances that might have similar effects against cancer. As a result, many other drugs have been developed and today chemotherapy is the first choice for treating many cancers.

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The pituitary gland is called the ‘conductor of the orchestra’ because it controls a whole range of vital functions of the body. It is a pea-sized endocrine gland located at the base of the brain between the eyes. It is an important part of the endocrine system and secretes many vital hormones. The pituitary is also called the ‘master’ endocrine gland because it not only secretes its own hormones but also tells other glands to release hormones.

Hormones are the chemical messengers of the body that travel through the bloodstream to different cells telling them what to do. Some of the major hormones produced by the pituitary gland are the Adrenocorticotrophic hormone, which maintains blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and the growth hormone which helps maintain healthy muscles and bones.

Harvey Williams Cushing, an American neurosurgeon, discovered that a pituitary gland that was underworked produced too little of the growth hormone so that a person became unusually small, while an overworked pituitary gland produced too much growth hormone that resulted in extremely tall people.

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Laparoscopic surgery is also called ‘minimally invasive surgery’. It is a type of surgery that allows a surgeon to operate inside the abdominal or pelvic region without making large cuts or incisions in the skin of the patient. It is a low-risk procedure that involves the use of an instrument called the laparoscope. This is a long, thin tube with high intensity light and a high-resolution camera in the front which allows the surgeon to see images on a monitor without the risks of an open surgery.

The first laparoscopic experiments were carried by Georg Kelling, a German physician in 1901. He used a cytoscope (a narrow tube with lenses) to perform the procedure on the abdomen of a dog. The first human laparoscopic surgery was carried out in 1910 by Hans Christian Jacobaeus, a Swedish surgeon.

Jacobaeus was the first to recognize the diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities of laparoscopic surgery as well as its difficulties and limits. He encouraged the need for endoscopic training in animals and on corpses and promoted the development of special laparoscopic instruments to optimize and simplify the procedure.

The advent of the computer chip-based television camera was a key event in the field of laparoscopy. It allowed the doctor to perform the surgery while viewing a projected image on a screen. Laparoscopic surgery has several advantages over traditional surgery. It leaves only a tiny scar. There is less loss of blood, less risk of infection, less pain after surgery and a shorter hospital stay. Today remote surgeries and robotic surgeries are typical laparoscopic procedures.

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Most of us know someone who is allergic to something. This is the person who sneezes continually, or breaks out in a rash, or cannot eat a particular kind of food. These allergies may be caused by various factors and are usually classified as seasonal allergies, food allergies, drug allergies, insect allergies, pet allergies and substance allergies.

One of the most common seasonal allergies is pollen allergy, also called “hay fever”. Leonardo Botallo, an Italian surgeon was the first to describe hay fever in 1565. He called it ‘rose cold’ as the patient he was treating complained that roses made his nose itch and gave him a headache. In 1903, an American doctor William Dunbar working in Germany proved that it was not pollen that caused the sneezing, but a toxin released by the body to try and get rid of the pollen. He attempted to produce an antitoxin, but was unsuccessful.

In 1910, an English physiologist and Nobel laureate Henry Hallett Dale identified this substance as ‘histamine’. In 1937, an Italian pharmacologist, Daniel Bovet discovered antihistamines which block histamine and control allergies. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for his research. Today, classes of drugs called antihistamines are commonly used to treat the symptoms of allergic reactions.

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It is common knowledge today that a balanced diet consists of an adequate amount of each of the main food groups of carbohydrates, proteins, fats and vitamins. However, it was only in the early 20th century that vitamins were discovered and their significance recognised.

The story of vitamins started in 1905 when Cornelis Adrianus Pekelharing, a Dutch physiologist, found that animals that were fed only proteins, carbohydrates and fats did not grow properly. Only when a small amount of milk was added to their diet did they show adequate growth. He concluded that the milk contained an unknown substance that helped in growth.

In 1911 Casimir Funk isolated a concentrate from rice polishings that cured a disease called polyneuritis in pigeons. He named this compound ‘Vitamine’ thinking that it was an amine.

In 1912, a British biochemist called Frederick Gowland Hopkins built upon the work of Pekelharing and deduced that in addition to the common nutrients, the body also needed “accessory food factors” that were required in trace amounts and were indispensible to growth.

Hopkins discovered the amino acid Tryptophan in 1901. He also discovered glutathione in 1921 and proved that it was found in the cells of animals and plants. He studied margarine and found that it was inferior to butter because it lacked vitamins A and D. As a result of his work, vitamin-enriched margarine was introduced in 1926.

He published two papers and vitamins in 1906 and 1912. His 1912 paper Feeding Experiments Illustrating the Importance of Accessory Food Factors in Normal Dietaries, emphasizes the need for vitamins in food. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his work.

The cornea is the clear, front part of the eye that covers the iris (coloured part of the eye), pupil (black hole in the centre of the iris) and the eye chamber. The main job of the cornea is to refract light so that the image strikes the retina.

The cornea may be damaged in a number of ways, which may lead to loss of vision and blindness. In such cases sight may be restored if the damaged cornea is replaced with a functional one. This was only made possible in 1905, when a Moravian doctor, Eduard Zirm transplanted a deceased child donor’s cornea to the eye of a chemical burn victim.

Cornea transplants became more common with advances in operating microscopes and the establishment of eye banks for the donation of corneas.

Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of cells in the body. Such a growth is called a tumour. There are two kinds of tumours - benign and malignant. Benign tumours are not life-threatening. Malignant tumours are life-threatening if left untreated and can spread to other parts of a body.

Radiation therapy is a cancer treatment that uses high-energy, concentrated radiation to kill cancer cells. It is an important tool for treating cancer and is often used along with chemotherapy and surgery.

Radiation therapy was introduced in the beginning of the 20th century. In 1902 German surgeon, Georg Perthes, began using X-rays to shrink cancerous growths. However, in those days radium was used for radiation therapy and exposure to radium is dangerous. Today, a much safer form of radiation therapy uses Cobalt 60 as a source of gamma rays to kill the cancer cells and keep them from growing and multiplying.

Patients may first undergo surgery to remove cancerous tumours and then have radiation therapy or sometimes a dose of radiation is given during the surgery. Each patient’s treatment depends on the kind of cancer he or she has.

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In 1786, Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist noted that an electrical current could be recorded from skeletal muscles. This set into motion a series of inventions and discoveries that finally ended with Willem Einthoven inventing the first Electrocardiograph machine in 1895.

Einthoven was a Dutch doctor and physiologist who was born in 1860 in Semarang, Indonesia. He published the first electrocardiogram (ECG) reading which was recorded on a string galvanometer, in 1902.

The idea behind the ECG is simple. Every time the heart beats, an electrical signal is generated. An electrocardiogram measures these electrical signals. To elaborate, electrocardiography is the method of graphic tracing of the electric current generated by the heart muscle during a heartbeat. It is a painless procedure that shows if the heart is beating at a normal rate and strength. It is used to check for different heart conditions and is one of the most commonly used tests in cardiac assessment today.

Electrocardiograms are made by applying electrodes to various parts of the body. The electrocardiogram shows upward and downward deflections that reflect the contraction of the atria and the ventricles of the heart. Any deviation is indicative of a possible heart disorder.

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Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian immunologist and physician born in 1868, in Baden bei Wien, Austria.

In 1900 Landsteiner found basic differences in human blood that made blood transfusions dangerous. In 1902 he showed that there were four basic types of human blood - A, B, O and AB - and developed the ABO system for blood typing based on these groups. This discovery made it possible to determine blood compatibility for safe blood transfusions.

He also discovered the Rhesus (Rh) blood factor which can result in miscarriage or illness in an unborn if undetected. Along with Erwin Popper, Landsteiner was the first to isolate the polio virus in 1909. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his achievements.

In 1936 he published a book called The Specificity of Serological Reactions, which laid the foundations for the science of immunochemistry.

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Ronald Ross was a British physician born in 1857 in Almora, India. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his discovery of the life cycle of the malarial parasite.

Deadly fevers were recorded as early as 2000 BC. These fevers, possibly due to malaria, caused a great number of deaths worldwide. Even today malaria causes around 3 million deaths every year and affects 40 per cent of the world’s population.

Till a little more than a century ago it was thought that these fevers were caused by something in the air, especially the air of swamps and in marshy areas. The word malaria itself means ‘bad air’ in Italian.

It was Sir Ronald Ross who discovered that malaria was not caused by bad air but by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. He traced the life history of the plasmodium parasite, and found that it began its life in the stomach of a mosquito. Here it bred rapidly and passed into the blood of a healthy person when the insect bit him.

Once mosquitoes were identified as the cause of malaria, worldwide efforts were made to destroy them and antimalarial drugs were developed. With this, the incidence of malaria dropped significantly all around the world.

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