Category: Science and Society

  • Culture Corner

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    The Elegant Movie – Thoughts on the films The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game By Bernie Langs [Note: Professor John Nash, featured in this set of reviews, passed away tragically in an auto accident as this article was going to press.] The physicist Brian Greene named his widely successful book, which served as…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part VIII: Joshua Lederberg, 1958 Prize in Physiology or Medicine  By Joseph Luna “You say [it was] a wonderful scientific achievement?” said Paul Ehrlich. “My dear colleague, for seven years of misfortune I had one moment of good luck!” Joshua Lederberg, then only 13 or so, read these final lines of The Microbe Hunters and…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part VII: Edward Lawrie Tatum, 1958 Prize in Physiology or Medicine By Joseph Luna It started, on paper at least, with butter. The chemical microbiology of dairy products was “certainly getting hot” as one professor dryly wrote to George Beadle, who in 1937 was starting his lab at Stanford University. Beadle, a plant geneticist who…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part VI: Fritz Albert Lipmann, 1953 Prize in Physiology or Medicine By Joseph Luna From Ra to Apollo to Huitzilopochtli, the ancients were onto something by worshipping the sun. Alongside water, no other entity was as important for the agricultural harvest or for predicting the seasonal movements of wind and life-giving rain. But the precise…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part V: Wendell M. Stanley, 1946 Prize in Chemistry By Joseph Luna In 1898, a Dutch botanist named Martinus Beijerinck faced a naming conundrum. He reproduced an experiment first performed six years earlier by Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky, who found that a disease of tobacco plants causing a mosaic discoloration of their precious nicotine laced…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part IV: John H. Northrop, 1946 Prize in Chemistry By Joseph Luna So far in this series, it seems as if we’ve focused on foreigners. For a young institution like Rockefeller in the early 20th century, it took time for original Nobel level work to emerge, and so it’s not too surprising that the first…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part III: Herbert Gasser, 1944 Prize in Physiology or Medicine By Joseph Luna It started with a twitch. Sometime around 1770 in Bologna, Luigi Galvani charged his Leiden jar, an early capacitor, with static electricity using a hand cranked friction machine. He then took a wire connected to the jar and touched it to the…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes.

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    Part II: Karl Landsteiner, 1930 Prize in Physiology or Medicine By Joseph Luna “Blood is a quite peculiar juice.” When the German poet, statesman and erstwhile scientist Goethe wrote those words in the early 1800s, he might as well have been paraphrasing a problem that physicians had been encountering for at least 150 years prior.…

  • TED Talks

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    By Susan Russo You may already know that, with more than 1,000,000,000 free views online, TED Talks (www.tedtalks.com) have become a worldwide medium for pondering new ideas, creating discussion on areas of serious concern, enjoying humor with an edge, or just taking a break from your normal (or abnormal) way of life.  TED stands for…

  • Ebola

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    By Aileen Marshall Are you like me and you’ve heard about the Ebola virus in the news, but didn’t really pay attention? Do you wonder if there’s anything to worry about? In doing the research, it seems there is little chance to be infected in the US. Here is a summary of what’s going on…