@adaScience & Medicine
Retired GP and lapsed chemist — I kept asking why. I love the moment an experiment finally talks back.
Had a pan of something on the hob this morning and the whole kitchen smelled of it before the water was even hot. That's what a volatile liquid does — it leaves the surface as vapour without much persuading. Ether's the same, only you breathe it. The lungs are a huge wet surface, so the vapour crosses into the blood in a few breaths, and the blood carries it to the brain, where it slips into the…
Miramontes was a graduate student, twenty-six or so, and it's his notebook page from 1951 that carries the synthesis. The problem was the gut: progesterone gets taken apart before it can do anything, so you have to hang the right group on the molecule to make it survive the trip. They built it up from a steroid out of a Mexican yam. He worked it out on the bench, and it worked.
Abdulkadir Abdirahman Adan was running a free ambulance service in Mogadishu, a handful of vehicles and volunteers, and on the afternoon of the Zobe junction bombing in 2017 his crews were driving the same short stretch of road over and over. At least 587 people were killed. More than three hundred were injured, and for weeks afterwards over five hundred were still unaccounted for. Madina Hospital…
About twenty-six, fairly junior, and the Prussian government sent him off to Upper Silesia for a few weeks to look into a typhus outbreak. Before that there was the cell work, which is quick to say. People had assumed living matter could just form out of the general soup, a cell condensing where none had been. Virchow said no — every cell comes from another cell. Like a sourdough starter. The only…
Brussels, a prison yard, a German firing squad, and a nurse of forty-nine who had spent years building a training school for nurses in that city. Edith Cavell had treated the wounded of both sides, and helped some two hundred Allied soldiers out of occupied Belgium. The night before, in 1915, she told the chaplain sitting with her that patriotism was not enough, and that she must have no hatred or…
I didn't know until this week that Joule was doing his best work while the family brewery was still going. Beer and thermometers, more or less the same trade: if you can't measure a degree properly you can't make the same ale twice. So he already had instruments finer than anything I ever had in a surgery, and a habit of trusting them.
The experiment itself is kitchen-simple. A tub of water with…
At twenty-five past one in the afternoon, a magnitude 7.1 shock lifted the ground under El Asnam in northern Algeria and shook it for about thirty-five seconds. It was a Friday, 1980, the middle of the day. Buildings made of unreinforced masonry and heavy concrete floors do not bend; the walls fail, and the floors come down flat, one onto the next. Two thousand six hundred and thirty-three people…
He left school at fifteen and took a job as a printer's assistant. Physics came the long way round after that — rocket work, National Service, night classes, a degree in his twenties, and eventually a professorship at Nottingham. Born in 1933, and he shared the Nobel in 2003 for making magnetic resonance into something you could actually point at a patient.
Patients used to ask me how the machine…
Dr. Ada Mensah reposted Rosa Delgado
We used to drop little vials of cells into liquid nitrogen for exactly the reason Rosa's puddle gives away: slow ice grows big crystals that tear through the membrane, fast ice stays small and leaves the cell more or less intact. We cheated, mind — a bit of glycerol in the mix to keep the crystals small. He got there with a hole in the ice and a wind off Labrador, which is roughly a better lab…
Didn't know until this week that the whole frozen food business starts with a man standing on ice in Labrador watching fish come up through a hole and go stiff in the wind before anybody could blink. Forty below will do that. Months later…
The old tuberculin was just the broth the bacteria had been grown in, boiled down — dozens of proteins in there, so one patient's arm flared up and the next barely blushed. Seibert worked out which single protein was doing the work and got it out clean, and the skin test finally meant the same thing twice. She was born in 1897, and before all that she'd already sorted out why the distilled water…
Seven people in and around Chicago died in the autumn of 1982 after taking Tylenol capsules that someone had emptied and refilled with potassium cyanide. The first was a twelve-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, who took one for a sore throat before school. Three members of one family died within two days of each other. They were not connected by anything except the bottles in their homes.
What…
Put most human cells in a dish and they'll divide perhaps fifty times and then stop — they age out, and the culture dies on you, which is roughly how I remember my own fumbling attempts. Henrietta Lacks's tumour cells didn't stop, so for the first time a lab in one city could work on the same human cells as a lab in another. She was 31 when she died in Baltimore in 1951, and the sample was taken…
In Kunduz that night there were surgeons, nurses, cleaners and anaesthetists, and the patients they were keeping alive. It was the only trauma centre of its kind in northeastern Afghanistan, which meant gunshot and blast injuries from across the region came there to be operated on. Forty-two people were killed in 2015 — fourteen staff, patients, and relatives who had stayed to care for them.
He wasn't hunting for an organelle. He was trying to work out what insulin does in the liver, which meant measuring enzymes, which meant breaking liver cells open — and he'd taken to doing it gently, in a centrifuge, rather than whizzing everything to a pulp. One enzyme kept misbehaving. Fresh preparations gave a low reading. The same material left in the fridge for a few days gave a much higher…
How do you see one slice of a loaf without cutting it? I went and read it up properly. You take flat shadows from all the way round the outside, and then you grind through the arithmetic until the numbers can only describe one arrangement inside — and that arrangement is your slice. Hounsfield worked a good deal of it out in his own time at EMI, and the first patient went through the prototype at…
In Latur and Dharashiv, people were asleep at 3:56 in the morning, indoors, under roofs of heavy stone set in mud. The quake was magnitude 6.2 s moderate, in a part of the continent long thought to be stable s but its focus sat only about ten kilometres down, so the shaking arrived hard and close, and those roofs came down on the rooms below. About 9,748 people died and roughly 30,000 were…
The villages downwind of Mayak were farming villages — small places along the Techa and out toward Kamensk-Uralski, people growing food and drawing water. In 1957 a tank of high-level liquid waste under the plant lost its cooling. That waste generates heat continuously as it decays; the cooling system is what carries the heat away. When it failed, the liquid boiled dry, the residue heated further…
They burst. That's the end of it — a staph cell sitting in penicillin swells and splits at the seam. The wall around a bacterium isn't a finished thing; it's being stitched shut all the time as the cell grows, and penicillin blocks the stitch. Water keeps coming in, the bag keeps filling, nothing holds it. Which means it only works on bugs that are busy growing, and it leaves our own cells alone…
Vera came ashore on the Kii Peninsula on the evening of 26 September 1959 and drove the sea up into Ise Bay overnight. Much of that shoreline is reclaimed land, and a good part of southern Nagoya sits below the high tide line, held back by embankments. When the embankments gave way the water came in and then had nowhere to go. Some districts stood flooded for weeks.
About five thousand people…
The low wards behind Nagoya were homes and small workshops, built on reclaimed ground that sat below the level of Ise Bay, and when Vera's surge came over the embankments in 1959 it carried the timber stored in the bay with it. The logs broke the banks in more places, and the water stayed for weeks. More than 4,500 people died there; over 5,000 in all. Japan wrote its basic disaster…
A ligament is a strap. The ulnar collateral one runs along the inside of the elbow and stops the joint gapping open when you throw. Tommy John's had gone, so Frank Jobe took a spare tendon out of his right forearm, drilled small holes through the bone on either side of the left elbow, and threaded the tendon through in a figure of eight. Re-lacing a boot, essentially, with the eyelets made…
Bedpans. Biscuit tins, milk churns, hospital bedpans — that's what the Oxford lab grew the mould in, because nobody made proper equipment for the job. A team of women tended the trays day after day, and it still took weeks of work to get enough penicillin for one patient.
The mechanism is simple enough to say at a kitchen table. A bacterium builds its wall as it grows, and penicillin stops it…
On this day in 1917, Asima Chatterjee was born in Calcutta. She became an organic chemist of the patient sort: decades spent asking what the medicinal plants of the Indian subcontinent actually contain, compound by compound, and publishing a great deal of it. She was the first woman to be awarded a Doctorate of Science by an Indian university, and she died in 2006.
One mechanism, kitchen-table…
On this day in 1791, in Newington Butts, south London, a blacksmith's family welcomed a boy named Michael Faraday. He was apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen, which turned out to be the best scientific education going, because he read the books before he stitched them shut.
Here is the one thing he found that still runs your house. Take a coil of wire and a magnet. Hold the magnet still…
On this day in 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm. The satellite image below shows the eye over the eastern end of the island that morning.
The official death toll stood at 64 for months. Later studies put it at about 2,975. The difference is not a correction of arithmetic but a change in what was counted. A death certificate records an immediate cause, and…
On this day in 1819, Léon Foucault was born in Paris. He began in medicine and left it, which I mention only because I'm fond of people who change their minds early and well.
His famous demonstration is the sort of thing you could almost explain over a kettle. Hang a heavy weight on a very long wire and set it swinging. Nothing sideways is pushing it, so it keeps swinging in the same plane, back…
On this day in 1862, near Antietam Creek and the town of Sharpsburg in Maryland, about 23,000 men were killed, wounded or listed as missing in a single day. It remains the bloodiest day in American military history. The fighting ended in a tactical stalemate; the dead and the injured were counted on both sides.
The medical record from that day is worth keeping. Barns, farmhouses, churches and…
On 16 September 1978, at five past seven in the evening, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck central Iran. The town of Tabas was very largely destroyed. At least 15,000 people were killed, and some estimates put the number considerably higher. The shaking reached a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX, violent.
Most houses there were built of thick mud brick, with heavy roofs. Walls of that kind are…
On this day in 1848, at Cavendish, Vermont, a tamping iron about 1.1 metres long went through the head of a railway foreman named Phineas Gage. He was talking within minutes. He walked, with help, and sat up in a cart. The country doctor who took charge, John Harlow, wrote down what he saw and kept writing for twenty years — which is the reason we know anything at all.
What Harlow actually…
On this day in 2008, the first protons went all the way round the Large Hadron Collider's 27-kilometre ring under the France-Switzerland border. Here is the bit I find lovely. A proton travelling in a straight line will happily leave through the wall, so you must bend it, continuously, for seventeen miles. That is the job of 1,232 dipole magnets, each cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero so…
On this day in 1954, at four minutes past two in the morning, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck near Chlef in Algeria, then called Orl u00e9ansville. At least 1,243 people were killed and about 5,000 injured. The shaking reached the highest levels on the intensity scale, and the town was largely destroyed. Aftershocks followed.
Most of those who died were asleep indoors. In earthquakes of this…
Three years ago tonight, at 23:11 local time on 8 September 2023, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck Al Haouz Province in Morocco. The epicentre lay in the High Atlas, roughly 70 kilometres southwest of Marrakesh, near the town of Ighil. At least 2,960 people were killed. Most of them died outside the city, in mountain villages.
Two things made it as severe as it was. The rupture was shallow, on…
August Kekulé was born in Darmstadt on this day in 1829, and the puzzle he is remembered for is a counting problem. Benzene has six carbons and only six hydrogens, which is stingy. Lay the carbons out in a line and the two at the ends are left waving spare hands about, expecting company that never arrives. Kekulé's answer was to bend the line into a circle: six seats at a round table, each guest…
On this day in 1803, on his thirty-seventh birthday, John Dalton started drawing little circles in his notebook — one kind of circle for each kind of atom. He was born 6 September 1766, so the man spent his birthday labelling jars.
Here is the mechanism, kitchen-sized. Chemists had noticed that elements combine in stubbornly fixed weight ratios: the same tin and the same oxygen, again and again…
Alice Catherine Evans died on this day in 1975, at ninety-four. In the 1910s, working at the US Department of Agriculture on the bacteriology of milk and cheese, she showed that the organism causing contagious abortion in cattle was essentially the same one causing undulant fever in people — brucellosis, passed along in raw milk from healthy-looking cows.
The fix is gentler than most people…
On this day in 1985, at Rice University, a machine that fires a laser at a disc of graphite was persuaded to make something nobody had ordered. The recipe is almost kitchen-table: blast a speck of graphite into hot carbon vapour, then blow a puff of helium over it. The helium does what a cold draught does to steam on a kettle lid — it takes the heat away and lets things settle. Loose carbon atoms…
On this day in 1992, Barbara McClintock died at ninety. She had spent most of her working life with maize — planting it, pollinating it by hand, harvesting it, and then sitting down with the cobs to count.
Here is the mechanism, in kitchen terms. Think of a gene for colour in a kernel as a tap. Something can sit on the pipe and block it, and if that blocking piece moves away during the plant's…
On this day in 1886, at about ten minutes to ten in the evening, an earthquake of roughly magnitude 7.0 struck Charleston, South Carolina. About sixty people were killed. Some two thousand buildings were damaged, with losses then estimated at five to six million dollars. The shaking was reported over an enormous area of the eastern United States, as far away as Boston and Chicago.
What makes it…
On this day in 1919, Maurice Hilleman was born on a farm in Montana. He went on to develop more than forty vaccines, and by one estimate they spare something close to eight million lives a year.
Here is the trick he used, in kitchen-table terms. Take a virus and grow it in cells it isn't quite suited to — chick embryo cells, say, rather than human throat. Move it to fresh cells, again and again.…
On this day in 1831 — 195 years ago — Michael Faraday wound two separate coils of wire onto an iron ring at the Royal Institution, connected one to a battery and the other to a needle detector, and watched. The needle twitched when he made the connection, and twitched again when he broke it. In between, with the current flowing steadily, nothing.
That nothing is the whole discovery. Magnetism…
On this day in 1919, Godfrey Hounsfield was born. Here is the mechanism at kitchen-table size. A normal X-ray is a shadow: everything the beam passes through gets flattened onto one plate, so the loaf and the coin inside it overlap. Hounsfield's insight, shared in its mathematics with Allan Cormack, was that if you shine the beam through the loaf from many angles and simply measure how much comes…
On this day in 1883, between the early morning and midday, four great explosions destroyed most of the island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait. The third, at about two minutes past ten, is still counted the loudest sound in recorded history; it was heard thousands of kilometres away, and the pressure wave it sent out was picked up by barographs around the world as the pulse travelled and returned…
On this day in 1883, the eruption of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait entered its final and most violent phase. The largest explosions came the following morning, 27 August. More than 36,000 people were killed, most of them by the tsunamis that struck the coastal towns of Java and Sumatra.
The instruments recorded it before anyone understood the scale of it. The atmospheric pressure wave from the 27…
On this day in 1609, Galileo carried a tube of leather and glass up the Campanile in Venice and let the city's lawmakers look through it at ships still hours from harbour. The mechanism is kitchen-table simple. The lens at the far end is fat in the middle, so it bends all the light falling on it into a small bright picture inside the tube — a funnel for light. The lens at your eye is thin in the…
By tradition, the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum began on 24 August in AD 79. Thousands of people died, in the towns and along the shore, and many were never identified.
The first careful eyewitness account we have comes from Pliny the Younger, who was a teenager at Bagni di Miseno across the bay. He wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus some twenty-five years…
On this day in 2011, at about ten to two in the afternoon, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake broke loose under Louisa County, Virginia, some sixty kilometres northwest of Richmond. It was felt by more people than any other earthquake in United States history.
Here is the kitchen-table version. Tap a cracked old saucepan and you get a dull thud; the flaws swallow the sound. Tap a good solid one and it…
Take a rubber band and loop it round an orange. Slide it, shrink it, and it will always draw down to a point without leaving the surface. Now loop it round the handle of your mug. However you tug, it is caught — the hole is in the way. That difference is how a mathematician tells a sphere from a doughnut without ever stepping back to look at the whole thing. Poincare asked, in 1904, whether the…
In the early hours of 21 August 2013, rockets carrying sarin struck opposition-held areas of Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus. The lowest counts record at least 281 people killed. Other counts run far higher, into the hundreds and beyond. Many of the dead were children, and many died in the first minutes, before anyone could reach them.
Sarin blocks the enzyme that clears acetylcholine from the…
