| FEBRUARY 22 - BIRTHS | |
| J. Michael Bishop | |
(source) |
 Born 22
Feb 1936
J(ohn) Michael Bishop was an American virologist and co-winner (with Harold Varmus) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for achievements in clarifying the cellular origins of retroviral oncogenes associated with cancer.  How
to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science,
by J. Michael Bishop. |
| Renato Dulbecco | |
(source) |
Born 22
Feb 1914
Italian virologist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975 (with Howard M. Temin and David Baltimore, both of whom had studied under him) for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell. |
| Fritz Strassmann | |
(source) |
Born 22
Feb 1902; died 22 April 1980.
German physical chemist who, with Otto Hahn and Lise Mietner, discovered neutron-induced nuclear fission in uranium (1938) and thereby opened the field of atomic energy used both in the atomic bomb for war and in nuclear reactors to produce electricity. Strassmann's analytical chemistry techniques showed up the lighter elements produced from neutron bombardment, which were the result of the splitting of the uranium atom into two lighter atoms. Earlier in his career, Strassmann codeveloped the rubidium-strontium technique of radio-dating geological samples. |
| Paul Kollsman | |
(source) |
Born 22 Feb 1900; died 26 Sep 1982.
German-American engineer who invented the world’s first accurate barometric altimeter (1928) that became vital to aviation safety. The original barometric altimeter was a simple instrument which displayed altitude by sensing barometric pressure, within an accuracy of 20 feet. On 24 Sep 1929, Jimmy Doolittle’s historic "blind flight" proved that the Kollsman altimeter made navigation possible "flying on the gauges." The guage was widely known as the “Kollsman Window” because it included a window to dial in a manual setting to calibrate the barometric pressure at the current sea-level. The invention played a major role in establishing routine scheduled air service in the U.S. and around the world.« |
| Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted | |
(source) |
Born 22
Feb 1879; died 17 Dec 1947.
Danish physical chemist known for a widely applicable acid-base concept identical to that of Thomas Martin Lowry of England. Though both men introduced their definitions simultaneously (1923), they did so independently of each other. Acids are recognized by an excess of H+ ions, and bases have an excess of OH- ions. Brønsted was also an authority on the catalytic properties and strengths of acids and bases. His chief interest was thermodynamic studies, but he also did important work with electrolyte solutions. |
| Heinrich Hertz | |
(source) |
Born 22
Feb 1857; died 1 Jan 1894.
Heinrich (Rudolf) Hertz was a German physicist who was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves. He studied under Kirchhoff and Helmholtz in Berlin, and became professor at Bonn in 1889. His main work was on electromagnetic waves (1887). Hertz generated electric waves by means of the oscillatory discharge of a condenser through a loop provided with a spark gap, and then detecting them with a similar type of circuit. Hertz's condenser was a pair of metal rods, placed end to end with a small gap for a spark between them. Hertz was also the first to discover the photoelectric effect. The unit of frequency - one cycle per second - is named after him. Hertz died of blood poisoning in 1894 at the age of 37. The
Creation of Scientific Effects, by Jed Z. Buchwald. |
| Pierre Janssen | |
(source) |
Born 22
Feb 1824; died 23 Dec 1907.
Pierre (-Jules-César) Janssen was a French astronomer who in 1868 devised a method for observing solar prominences without an eclipse (an idea reached independently by Englishman Joseph Norman Lockyer). Janssen observed the total Sun eclipse in India (1868). Using a spectroscope, he proved that the solar prominences are gaseous, and identified the chromosphere as a gaseous envelope of the Sun. He noted an unknown yellow spectral line in the Sun in 1868, and told Lockyer (who subsequently recognized it as a new element he named helium, from Greek "helios" for sun). Janssen was the first to note the granular appearance of the Sun, regularly photographed it, and published a substantial solar atlas with 6000 photographs (1904).« |
| Adolphe Quetelet | |
(source) |
Born 22
Feb 1796; died 17 Feb 1874.
(Lambert) Adolphe (Jacques) Quetelet was a Belgian mathematician, astronomer, statistician, and sociologist known for his pioneering application of statistics and the theory of probability to social phenomena, especially crime. At an observatory in Brussels that he established in 1833 at the request of the Belgian government, he worked on statistical, geophysical, and meteorological data, studied meteor showers and established methods for the comparison and evaluation of the data. In Sur l'homme et le developpement de ses facultés, essai d'une physique sociale (1835) Quetelet presented his conception of the average man as the central value about which measurements of a human trait are grouped according to the normal curve. Image: from a 1974 Belgian postage stamp. |
| Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier | |
(image) |
Born 22
Feb 1785; died 1845.
French physicist who discovered the Peltier effect (1834), that at the junction of two dissimilar metals an electric current will produce heat or cold, depending on the direction of current flow. In 1812, Peltier received an inheritance sufficient to retire from clockmaking and pursue a diverse interest in phrenology, anatomy, microscopy and meteorology. Peltier made a thermoelectric thermoscope to measure temperature distribution along a series of thermocouple circuits, from which he discovered the Peltier effect. Lenz succeeded in freezing water by this method. Its importance was not fully recognized until the later thermodynamic work of Kelvin. The effect is now used in devices for measuring temperature and non-compressor cooling units.« [Image: Peltier's atmospheric electricity gauge.] |
|
Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| FEBRUARY 22 - DEATHS | |
| Sir Raymond (William) Firth | |
(source) |
 Died
22 Feb 2002 (born 25 Mar 1901)
New Zealander social anthropologist whose major research was with the Maori and other peoples of Oceania and Southeast Asia. Firth conducted his first research in the British Solomon Islands 1928-29. The economic organization of primitive societies became one of Firth's primary interests as indicated by his works on the Kauri gum industry and the fishing industry of Malaysia. Among his other chief interests were social structure and religion, especially of the Tikopia of the Solomon Islands, and the anthropological treatment of symbols. Firth was also well know for his work concerning sacrifices. In 1963, Raymond began his work on the influence of economics on the ideology of sacrifice. |
| Félix d' Hérelle | |
(source) |
Died
22 Feb 1949 (born 25 Apr 1873)
French-Canadian microbiologist generally known as the discoverer of the bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria. (The earlier identification of the bacteriophage by the British microbiologist F.W. Twort in about 1915 became obscured by Twort's disinclination to take credit for or to pursue his initial findings. |
| Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt | |
(EB) |
Died
22 Feb 1925 (born 20 July 1836)
English physician, the inventor of the short clinical thermometer. The need for suitable equipment to measure the progress of a fever by temperature at the bedside was solved in 1866 when Allbutt invented the conveniently portable six-inch clinical thermometer, able to take a temperature in five minutes. It replaced a foot-long model that required 20 minutes to determine a patient's temperature. His investigations also led to the improved treatment of arterial diseases when he proved than angina is caused by the narrowing of the coronary artery. |
| Sara Josephine Baker | |
(source) |
Died
22 Feb 1945 (born 15 Nov 1873)
American physician who was a pioneer in public health and child welfare in the United States. She was appointed assistant to the Commissioner for Public Health of New York City, later heading the city's Department of Health in 'Hell's Kitchen' for 25 years. Convinced of the value of well-baby care and the prevention of disease, in 1908 she founded the Bureau of Child Hygiene after visiting mothers on the lower east side, thus helping to decrease the death rate by 1200 from the previous year. Her work made the New York City infant mortality rate the lowest in the USA or Europe at the time. She set up free milk clinics, licensed midwives, and taught the use of silver nitrate to prevent blindness in newborns. |
| George Francis FitzGerald | |
| Died
22 Feb 1901 (born 3 Aug 1851)
Irish physicist whose suggestion of a way to produce waves helped lay a foundation for wireless telegraphy. He also first developed a theory, independently discovered by Hendrik Lorentz, that a material object moving through an electromagnetic field would exhibit a contraction of its length in the direction of motion. This is now known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, which Einstein used in his own special theory of relativity. He also was first to propose the structure of comets as a head made of large stones, but a tail make of such smaller stones (less than 1-cm diam.) that the pressure of light radiation from the sun could deflect them. FitzGerald also studied electrolysis as well as electromagnetic radiation.« |
|
| Sir Charles Lyell | |
| Died
22 Feb 1875 (born 14 Nov 1797)
(Baronet) Scottish geologist largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that all features of the Earth's surface are produced by physical, chemical, and biological processes through long periods of geological time. The concept was called uniformitarianism (initially set forth by James Hutton). |
|
| Charles Willson Peale | |
| Died
22 Feb 1827 (born 15 Apr 1741)
American portrait painter and naturalist who opened the first U.S. popular Museum of Natural Science and Art. Alongside fame as a portraitist, Peale maintained a diverse interest in science. He used a physiognotrace machine used to record profiles and make silhouettes. He patented a fireplace, porcelain false teeth, and a new kind of wooden bridge. He invented a technique to put motion with pictures and wrote papers on engineering and hygiene. He perfected a kind of portable writing desk, named the polygraph, which reproduced several copies of a manuscript at once. In 1786, he established the first U.S. scientific museum with both living and stuffed specimens, and later a complete mastodon skelton he helped excavate (1801).« Mr.
Peale's Museum, by Charles Coleman Sellers. |
|
| Caspar Friedrich Wolff | |
| Died
22 Feb 1794 (born 18 Jan 1734)
German physiologist, known as the "founder of modern embryology." In Theoria Generationis (1759) he first wrote an epigenetic theory of development: that the organs of living things take shape gradually from non-specific tissue. Wolff applied the microscope to the study of animal embryology and remarked that "the particles which constitute all animal organs in their earliest inception are little globules, which may be distinguished under a microscope." The book was ignored for half a century, as the prevailing idea was held that life begins preformed in a small body that grows larger in the same form. His name is found describing parts of the kidneys of embryos: the Wolffian body and the Wolffian ducts.  |
|
| Santorio Santorio | |
(source) |
Died 22 Feb 1636 (born 29 Mar 1561)
Italian physician who made the first systematic study of basal metabolism. In his research, he was also the first to employ instruments of precision and to apply quantitative experimental research techniques in the practice of medicine. His adaptation of the pendulum to medical practice (to determine pulse rate) was probably inspired by his discussions with Galileo on the latter's experiments with pendulums in 1602. His most famous medical contribution was a balance used to study the metabolic changes undergone by his experimental subjects, who included Galileo. He published descriptions of a new type of thermometer which may well have been inspired by Galileo's thermoscope. [Image right: Santorio's balance to to measure body weight after a meal] |
| Amerigo Vespucci | |
(source) |
Died
22 Feb 1512 (born 9 Mar 1451)
Spanish astronomer whose name was given to the New World - America - because it was he and not Columbus, who realized and announced that Columbus had discovered a new continent. |
| FEBRUARY 22 - EVENTS | |
| Trans-Pacific hot air balloon | |
(source) |
In 1995, Steve Fossett completed the first hot air balloon flight over
Pacific Ocean (9600 km). On 3 Mar
2005, he completed the first solo non-stop and fastest flight
around the world without refueling, in The GlobalFlyer, a
single-engine, single-use experimental jet plane.« |
| Bubble boy | |
(source) |
In 1984, a 12-year-old Houston boy known publicly only as "David," who
had spent most his life in a plastic bubble because he had no immunity
to disease, died 15 days after being removed on 7
Feb 1984 from the bubble for a bone-marrow transplant. It had been
hoped that transplanted marrow stem cells - precursors to blood cells -
would evolve and become the patient's own T-cells. Born with a rare disorder
called severe combined immune deficiency (SCID),
David
Vetter lacked T-cells. He had lived since birth in this protective,
germ-free environment since birth at Texas Children's Hospital, Houston.
DVD
- The American Experience: The Boy in the Bubble (2006) |
| Streptomycin | |
 |
In 1946, Dr Selman Abraham Waksman
announced his discovery
of the antibiotic streptomycin, the first specific antibiotic effective
against tuberculosis. In 1943, he had isolated streptomycin from a mold
he had known and studied early in his life. For this work, he was awarded
the 1952 Nobel Prize.« |
| Tallest human | |
(source) |
In 1918, the world record tallest human, Robert Pershing Wadlow, was born
in Alton, Ill. He grew to a height of 8 feet 11 inches. This unique size
was attributed to an over active pituary gland, which produced much higher
than normal levels of growth hormone. Today's medical science can compensate
for such problems - but in the 1920s there was no therapy available. He
died from a fatal infection which set in due to a blister on his foot,
despite emergency surgery and blood transfusions, on 15 Jul 1940. At the
time of his death he weighed 490 pounds. The 1,000-pound casket required
a dozen pallbearers, assisted by eight other men. [Image:
Wadlow with his brother, 1936] |
| First English clinical radiology report | |
(source) |
In 1896, the first use of clinical radiology
in England was reported in The Lancet*
by surgeon Sir Robert Jones and
the head of Liverpool University's physics department, Oliver
Lodge. A 12-year-old boy, who had shot himself in his wrist the previous
month, was examined
in Lodge's laboratory on 7 Feb 1896 at Jones'
request. Merely probing could not locate the bullet. Jones had heard of
Roentgen's
discovery of X-rays a few months earlier. Using X-rays, the pellet was
identified embedded in the third carpo-metacarpal joint. Jones subsequently
financed an X-ray apparatus for his senior assistant who had been with
him then, Charles Thurstan Holland,
to pioneer radiology at Royal Southern Hospital, Liverpool.« [Image:
X-ray from 1896 of hand with buckshot made at Columbia University, USA] |
| Urea synthesis | |
Wöhler (source) |
In 1828, German biochemist Friederich Wöhler
informed Jakob Berzelius that he
had synthesized the organic chemical, urea. This was a landmark event,
for it was the first time a material previously only associated with the
body function of a living thing, was made from inorganic chemicals of non-living
origin. In this case, urea had formerly been known only from the urine
of animals. |
| Popcorn | |
(source) |
In 1630, popcorn was introduced to the English colonists by an Indian named
Quadequina who brought it in deerskin bags as his contribution at their
first Thanksgiving dinner. Popcorn is a type of corn with smaller kernels
than regular corn, and when heated over a flame, it "pops" into the snack
we know it as today. Native Americans were growing it for more than a thousand
years before the arrival of European explorers. In 1964, scientists digging
in southern Mexico found a small cob of popcorn discovered to be 7,000
years old. Today, the United States grows nearly all of the world's popcorn. |
