Lessons from Edward Jenner's Life. #edwardjenner #thinker #doer #shorts
Channel: Doctor Rock Britto
Date: 10/07/2023

Lessons from Edward Jenner's Life. #edwardjenner #thinker #doer #motivation #doctorrockbritto 
In Edward Jenner's day the greatest honour that could be bestowed upon a scientist was to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).  Jenner was awarded that distinction in 1789 for a paper that explained the nesting habits of the cuckoo - a bird that had intrigued philosophers and naturalists since the days of Aristotle.

As you know, the cuckoo parasites other species of birds during the rearing of its young.  It lays a single egg in the nest of a bird of another species. The foster-parents then feed and raise the young cuckoo as if it were their own.  Only the young cuckoo survives.  All eggs and fledglings belonging to the birds that built the nest disappear. Jenner determined to find out why only the cuckoo survives in each nest.


What Edward Jenner had realised was that it was not the parent cuckoo that ejected the foster parents' eggs and chicks from the nest, as was previously believed, but the newly hatched cuckoo.  In its first few days of life the fledgling bird worked its way backwards, up the side of the nest, pushing behind it an egg or young bird, until this could be thrown from the nest.  It repeated this task until only it remained in the nest.  It therefore took over the food supply provided tirelessly by the foster parents. By dissecting young cuckoos Edward Jenner discovered that their bodies are specially provided with a depression in the back, between the wings.  In this the young bird cups the objects which it is pushing from the nest.  This depression disappears before the fledgling cuckoo is 12 days old.

Edward Jenner made many observations and experiments to support his hypothesis. His findings remained contentious until the twentieth century when naturalists, such as Eric Hosking, were able to photograph the phenomenon.