| FEBRUARY 6 - BIRTHS | |
| Gerard Kitchen O'Neill | |
(source) |
 Born 6
Feb 1927; died 27 Apr 1992.
American physicist who invented the colliding-beam storage ring, now a standard feature of high-energy particle accelerators. To increase the energy output of particle accelerators this design utilizes beams of particles moving through a ring-shaped chamber in opposite directions. As a leading advocate of space colonization, he wrote in his book The High Frontier (1978), that space colonies could be the ultimate solution to such terrestrial problems as pollution, overpopulation, and the energy shortage. He designed a 1-km long sealed cylindrical space station. Built primarily of processed lunar materials and using solar energy, it would be capable of sustaining a human colony indefinitely in space between the Earth and the Moon. |
| Mary Douglas Leakey | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1913; died 9 Dec 1996.
née Nicol English-born archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who made several of the most important fossil finds subsequently interpreted and publicized by her husband, the noted anthropologist Louis Leakey. For every vivid claim made by Louis about the origins of man, the supporting evidence tended to come from Mary's scrupulous scientific approach. As "the woman who found our ancestors", Mary's work in East Africa shed new light on human evolution. After Louis' death in 1972, she enjoyed her most spectacular find: three trails of fossilised hominid footprints 3.6 million years old, which she discovered at Laetoli in Tanzania (1978-9) showing man's ancestors were walking upright at a much earlier period than previously believed.  Ancestral
Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings,
by Virginia Morell. |
| William P. Murphy | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1892; died 9 Oct 1987.
American physician who with George R. Minot in 1926 reported success in the treatment of pernicious anemia with a liver diet. The two men shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George H. Whipple, whose research they had built upon. Anaemia is seen as a loss of red blood corpuscles, effectively a dilution of the blood. With the liver diet, it became clear that anemia was not (as then supposed) due to the presence of a supposed poisonous substance, but rather to the absence of a substance needed to produce red blood corpuscles. Such a substance must be present in liver, since the patient's condition became normal when liver was supplied as a food. Thus these researchers had discovered a new function of the liver. |
| Robert Maillart | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1872; died 5 Apr 1940.
Swiss bridge engineer whose radical use of reinforced concrete revolutionized masonry arch bridge design. Maillart utilized the structural strength and expressive potential of reinforced concrete to generate a modern form for his bridges. To avoid structural beams and arches, he established a structural form based on both flat and curved concrete slabs reinforced with steel. Using very simple construction concepts, Maillart produced major new forms, fundamentally radical ideas, such as: the open three-hinged, hollow-box arch, the mushroom slab, and the deck-stiffened arch. |
| George A. Dorsey | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1868; died 29 Mar 1931.
George A(mos) Dorsey was an American anthropologist and early U.S. ethnographer of North American Indians, especially the Mandan tribe. He engaged in extensive field research, particularly among the Plains Indians, and published extensively. Between 1891-92 he conducted anthropological investigations in Peru, Ecuador, Chili and Bolivia for the World's Columbian Exposition. His positions included being a professor of anthropology, professor of comparative anatomy, Curator of the Field Museum of Natural History. On15 Sep 1897, Dorsey began testifying at the murder trial of Adolph Luetgert, probably the first anthropologist to testify in an American criminal trial. After WW I, he wrote works popularizing the science of anthropology.« 
The
story of civilization: Man's own show, by George Amos
Dorsey. |
| C. Lloyd Morgan | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1852; died 6 Mar 1936.
C(onwy) Lloyd Morgan was a British zoologist and psychologist, best remembered for coining Morgan's Canon expressing that the interpretation of animal behavior should be described in the simplest possible terms: "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of one which stands lower in the psychological scale." (In 1947, Philip L. Harriman stated that Morgan's Canon was a simply a specialised form of Occam's razor applied to animal psychology.) For his work, Morgan is sometimes called the founder of comparative, or animal, psychology. His Canon was significant in developing concepts of behaviorism in twentieth century academic psychology.« Habit
and Instinct, by C. Lloyd Morgan. |
| Edwin Klebs | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1834; died 23 Oct 1913.
(Theodor Albrecht) Edwin Klebs was a German physician and bacteriologist noted for his work on the bacterial theory of infection. Klebs' first success was the invention of the paraffin wax embedding of sections of tissue for histological investigation With Friedrich August Johannes Löffler in 1884, he discovered the diphtheria bacillus, known as the Klebs-Löffler bacillus. He died, as so many physicians of his time, of tuberculosis. |
| Sir Charles Wheatstone | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1802; died 19 Oct 1875.
English physicist who popularized the Wheatstone bridge, a device that accurately measured electrical resistance and became widely used in laboratories. He didn't actually invent the "Wheatstone Bridge". His contemporary, Samuel Hunter Christie, came up with the idea of the bridge circuit, but Wheatstone set the precedent for using it in the way in which it has been most commonly used. Over time, the device became associated with him and took on his name. He did, however, invent the concertina (1829), the stereoscope (1838), and an early form of the telegraph. He also developed a chronoscope (1842) to determine the velocity of projectiles at an English gunnery. |
| John Stevens Henslow | |
(source) |
Born 6
Feb 1796; died 16 May 1861.
British botanist, clergyman, geologist and mentor of Charles Darwin. Henslow popularized botany at the University of Cambridge by introducing new methods of teaching the subject. He fostered independent discovery and utilized unusual field trips for his students. In order to persuade farmers to apply scientific methods to their operations, Henslow gave public lectures on the fermentation of manure and wrote newsletters for publication in local newspapers. During the potato famine (1845-46) in Ireland, he showed stricken farmers how to extract starch from rotten potatoes. |
|
Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| FEBRUARY 6 - DEATHS | |
| Salvador Luria | |
(source) |
 Died
6 Feb 1991 (born 13 Aug 1912)
Italian-born American biologist who (with Max Delbrück and Alfred Day Hershey) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for research on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. |
| I.S. Bowen | |
1984 (source) |
Died
6 Feb 1973 (born 21 Dec 1898)
Ira Sprague Bowen was an American astrophysicist. His investigation of the ultraviolet spectra of highly ionized atoms led to his explanation of the unidentified strong green spectral lines of gaseous nebulae (clouds of rarefied gas) as forbidden lines of ionized oxygen and nitrogen. This emission, appearing to match no known element, had formerly been suggested to be due to a hypothetical element, "nebulium." Bowen was able to show, that in reality, the emission lines exactly matched those calculated to be the "forbidden lines" of ionized oxygen and nitrogen under extremely low pressure. This made a major advance in the knowledge of celestial composition. He was director of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories from 1948-64.« |
| Julian H(aynes) Steward | |
(source) |
Died
6 Feb 1972 (born 31 Jan 1902)
Julian H(aynes) Steward was an American anthropologist best known as one of the leading neoevolutionists of the mid-20th century and as the founder of the theory of cultural ecology. He also did studies of the social organization of peasant villages, conducted ethnographic research among the North American Shoshoni Indians and various South American Indians. Steward acquired a lifelong interest and attachment to the Shoshoni and Northern Paiute Indians. He held an intense drive to salvage and preserve as much information as possible on native North American Indians before all of the information and culture was lost. |
| Frank Gouldsmith Speck | |
(source) |
Died
6 Feb 1950 (born 8 Nov 1881)
American cultural anthropologist and ethnographer of the Eastern Woodland Indians, who chose to study and preserve knowledge of their culture. As a boy, he lived with Fidelia Fielding, a Native American, and the last speaker of her tribal language, from whom he learned the Mohegan language and literature. With this rich background, at university he began study of anthropological linguistics, encouraged by anthropologist Franz Boas. Speck spent his career in extensive fieldwork. By staying with the Indian comunities he earned the trust of the tribes. He reconstructed scattered remnants of ritual and lore into an extensive record. He collected arts and crafts as artifacts of the material culture, and was a pioneer in ethnoscience and ethnomusicology.« Naskapi:
The Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula, by Frank
G. Speck. |
| Edward Emerson Barnard | |
(source) |
Died
6 Feb 1923 (born 16 Dec 1857)
Astronomer who pioneered in celestial photography, specializing in wide-field photography. From the time he began observing in 1881, his skill and keen eyesight combined to make him one of the greatest observers. Barnard came to prominence as an astronomer through the discovery of numerous comets. In the 1880s, a patron of astronomy in Rochester, N.Y. awarded $200 per new comet was found. Barnard discovered eight - enough to build a "comet house" for his bride. At Lick Observatory (1888-95) he made the first photographic discovery of a comet; photographed the Milky Way; and discovered the fifth moon of Jupiter. Then he joined Yerkes Observatory, making his Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way. |
| (Karl Georg Friedrich) Rudolf Leuckart | |
(source) |
Died
6 Feb 1898 (born 7 Oct 1822)
Rudolf (Karl Georg Friedrich) Leuckart was a German zoologist and teacher who initiated the modern science of parasitology. As a youth, he showed an early interest in zoology and in insects in particular. While attending medical school at the University of Gottingen, he studied under the renowned zoologist, Rudolph Wagner, who encouraged him to research in this branch of science. In 1847, he was appointed a zoology lecturer. He made an expedition to the North Sea for the study of marine invertebrates. Leuckart also described the complicated life histories of various parasites, including tapeworms and the liver fluke, and demonstrated that some human diseases, such as trichinosis, are caused by multicellular animals of the various wormlike phyla. |
| Theodor Billroth | |
(source) |
Died
6 Feb 1894 (born 26 Apr 1829)
Christian Albert Theodor Billroth was a Viennese surgeon, generally considered to be the founder of modern abdominal surgery. He was a friend and colleague of Halsted. Billroth was a pioneer abdominal surgeon, and perfected many procedures, including gastric resections still used daily in general surgery. He helped establish the foundations of academic training and university direction of surgical sciences. |
| Agostino Bassi | |
B.bassiana fungus on soybean loopers (source) |
Died
6 Feb 1856 (born 25 Sep 1773)
The pioneer Italian bacteriologist Agostino Bassi de Lodi (the "Father of Insect Pathology"), 10 years before Louis Pasteur, found disease-causing microorganisms. Bassi showed (1835-6) that a silk worm disease was contagious and could be transmitted naturally by direct contact or infected food, or experimentally by means of a pin previously sterilized in a flame. The causative agent was later shown to be a fungus that multiplied in and on the body of the insect. This was the first microorganism to be recognized as a contagious agent of animal disease. Indeed, the first animal pathogen to be understood was of insects, not humans! In 1844, he believed that "contagion by living organisms" also infected humans with measles, syphilis, and the plague. |
| Pierre-André Latreille | |
(source) |
Died 6 Feb 1833 (born 29 Nov 1762)
French zoologist and Roman Catholic priest (ordained 1786) who became the father of modern entomology. During the French Revolution he was imprisoned in Bordeaux. He made the acquaintance of a physician, a fellow-prisoner, who had obtained a specimen of the rare beetle, Necrobia ruficollis. It was through this discovery that Latreille became acquainted with the naturalist, Bory de Saint-Vincent, who obtained his release. He did not share Lamarck's evolutionary views, although he worked under him from 1805 at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. Latreille made the first detailed classification of crustaceans and insects. He used a "natural method" of classification combining the approaches of Linnaeus and Fabricius. |
| Joseph Priestley | |
 |
Died
6 Feb 1804 (born 13 Mar 1733)
English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist who discovered the element oxygen. His early scientific interest was electricity, but he is remembered for his later work in chemistry, especially gases. He investigated the "fixed air" (carbon dioxide) found in a layer above the liquid in beer brewery fermentation vats. Although known by different names at the time, he also discovered sulphur dioxide, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and silicon fluoride. Priestley is remembered for his invention of a way of making soda-water (1772), the pneumatic trough, and recognising that green plants in light released oxygen. His political opinions and support of the French Revolution, were unpopular. After his home and laboratory were set afire (1791), he sailed for America, arriving at New York on 4 Jun 1794.« Joseph
Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth,
by F W. Gibbs. |
| FEBRUARY 6 - EVENTS | |
| Swine flu | |
(source) |
In 1976, swine flu claimed
the life of 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis. On the previous afternoon, this
Army recruit told his drill instructor at Fort Dix, N.J. that he felt tired
and weak but not sick enough to see military medics or skip a big training
hike. Yet, he died within 24 hours, killed by an influenza not seen since
the Spanish flu
of 1918-19 which took 500,000 American lives and 20 million worldwide.
On 24 Mar 1976, following advice
from medical experts, President Ford called for the U.S. to give swine
flu vaccinations,
a $135 million program
of mass inoculation of the entire population. No comparable vaccination
effort had ever been attempted in the U.S. before. Afterwards, research
showed it would probably have been much less deadly than the Spanish flu.
[Image:
swine Influenza virus electron microscope view] |
| Golf on the moon | |
(source) |
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard takes
a few shots at some golf balls while on the moon. Near the end of the second
moonwalk, and just before entering the lunar module for the last time,
Shepard (an avid golfer) attached a 6-iron golf club to the end of a sample
collecting tool. Despite thick gloves and a stiff suit that forced him
to swing the
club with one hand only, he hit two golf balls. The first landed in a nearby
crater. The second was hit squarely, and in the one-sixth gravity of the
moon, Shepard said it traveled "miles and miles and miles." Then the U.S.
Apollo IV astronauts prepared to head back to Earth after a 33-hour stay
on the moon. The golf club is on display at the U.S. Golf Association headquarters
in Far Hills, N.J. |
| ICBM | |
(source) |
In 1959, the United States successfully test-fired
for the first time a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile from Cape
Canaveral. Eighteen Titan
I launch complexes (for 54 missiles, each carrying a 4.5 megaton warhead)
were built in California, Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota, and Washington
state at an average cost of $44.4 million apiece (in constant 1996 dollars).
The first silo launching of an ICBM, a USAF Titan at Vandenberg Air Force
Base occurred on 3 May 1961. Titan I missiles were only on alert from 1962
to 1965. |
| Cryotron | |
(source) |
In 1957, the cryotron, a superconductive computer switch is announced.
Developed by Dudley Allen Buck at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the cryotron was the first practical use of superconductivity - the ability
of some metals to conduct current with no resistance at extremely
low temperatures (below -420 degrees Fahrenheit). Its operation was based
on the effects of magnetic fields on superconductivity at liquid helium
temperatures. The cryotron was hailed as a revolutionary component for
miniaturizing the room-sized computers of the 1950s. [Image:
in the hand of its inventor, the cryotron, so incredibly small cryotron
100 could fit in a thimble.] |
| First test-tube human egg fertilization | |
(source) |
In 1944*,
American obstetrician and gynecologist Dr
John Rock (1890-1984) with Miriam F. Menkin fertilized the first human
egg in a test tube. After hundreds of efforts, they had produced the first
laboratory- fertilized, two-cell human egg. The embryo was not returned
to the womb, For some 15 years after 1938, Rock and Dr. Arthur Hertig sought
to retrieve early fertilized human eggs from discarded hysterectomy tissue.
Over that time they found thirty-four fertilized eggs, providing new knowledge
about human conception. Aiding them in the search was Harvard physiologist
Gregory Pincus. In 1938, Rock hired technician Miriam Menkin to try to
extract and fertilize human eggs in his laboratory. Rock is best known
as a developer of the birth control pill. |
| Germanium | |
(source) |
In 1886, German chemist, Clement Winkler discovered the element germanium.
He had a background in managing a cobalt glassworks and then on the faculty
of the Freiberg School of Mining, when he discovered germanium in the mineral
argyrodite. Analyzing the silver sulphide ore, he found that all the known
elements it contained amounted to only 93 per cent of its weight. Tracking
down the remaining 7 per cent, he found the new element he called germanium
(for Germany). This turned out to be the eka-silicon predicted by Dmitry
I. Mendeleyev in 1871. |
