bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A laboratory libation
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A. R. Todd, later Sir Alexander, and still later Lord Todd of Trumpington, was often known in Cambridge, where he held the Chair of Organic Chemistry, as Lord Todd Almighty. He was famous for many tours de force of structure determination, most notably that of the nucleotides—the building blocks that are connected together to form the long chains of DNA (and of RNA) [88]. Todd was an earthy Scotsman (born in 1907 in Glasgow) and known as something of an authoritarian. A jingle by one of his colleagues ran:
Do you not think it is odd
That a commonplace fellow like Todd
Should spell, if you please,
His name with two d’s,
When one is sufficient for God?
Hooke’s tease
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Scientists have been known to complain of a want of candour in their confrères, in pursuit of patents or merely priority. Matters were far worse in earlier days. The natural philosophers of the Enlightenment frequently sought to safeguard their claims to a discovery, while minimizing the risk of public error, by depositing their dated observations in an archive or by concealing them in a cipher. Isaac Newton’s contemporary, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), was a formidable polymath, a friend of (among others) Christopher Wren, and it was he who designed the monument in Pudding Lane in the City of London to mark the spot at which the Great Fire started in 1666.
Hooke was habitually jealous in guarding what would now be called his intellectual property and mistrustful of his contemporaries. His name is enshrined in Hooke’s Law of Elasticity, which states that extension of an elastk material is directly proportional to the applied stretching force. Hooke’s interest in elasticity stemmed in part from his invention of the balance-spring watch. In 1665, Hooke formulated an encrypted description of this invention in the form: ‘the True theory of Elasticity or Springiness, and a particular Explication there of in several Subjects in which it is to be found: And the way of computing the velocities of bodies moved by them. ceiii11osssttuu.’ This last was an anagram, as Hooke disclosed two years later, when he was sure of his results and satisfied that they could be applied to his balance-spring:
The divine spark conies by night
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Many scientists have experienced the transcendental flash of revelation while relaxing or between sleep and wakefulness. One captivating case was that of the Austrian physiologist Otto Loewi (1873-1961), Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Graz and chiefly remembered for his discovery of chemical transmission of the nerve impulse. In 1936, this brought him the Nobel Prize, which he shared with his English friend, Henry Dale [36]. A central question in neurobiology at the time was whether nerve impulses are imparted to the muscles that they control by way of a chemical mediator, for Dale had already shown that a substance found in the body, acetylcholine, could stimulate the action of a nerve; it could, for instance, slow down the beating of a heart, exactly like stimulation of the vagus nerve, which controls the heart muscle.
Loewi had fallen asleep one night over a novel, when he woke with a start, conscious that a dazzling revelation had erupted in his mind. He reached for a pencil and jotted down its essence. But when he awoke next morning he could neither recapture his great idea, nor, to his chagrin, interpret his note. All that day he sat in his laboratory, vainly hoping that the sight of all the familiar apparatus would jolt his memory, and trying without success to understand what he had scribbled. Loewi went to bed that night a disappointed man but during the small hours he woke, the idea once more effulgent in his mind. This time he was more careful in putting it on paper.
Old soldiers never die
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It was Ernest Rutherford [ 16] who declared that scientists (by which he meant physicists) never grow old, for, unlike the less fortunate majority of the population who have no laboratories to play in, they retain throughout their lives the child-like pleasure of exploration. Here is a vignette of Rutherford’s patron, J. J. Thomson, famous for many discoveries, most notably that of the electron. On his death at the age of 84 in 1940 his obituarist, the German theoretician Max Born (1882—1970), later Professor of Physics in Edinburgh, recalled
It was Prof. J. J. Thomson’s name which took me to Cambridge in 1906 ...
Fortunate furtive encounter
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Max Born [73], one of the founders of quantum theory, was ejected from his professorial chair at G6ttingen after the t\azi government promulgated its racial laws in 1933, and eventually found shelter in Edinburgh. It was a chance encounter with Rutherford [16] that opened this avenue of escape for him:
In 1927 he had joined an international congress in Como. During one lecture which he did not find interesting and while they were showing some slides he had made good use of the darkness to sneak out of the auditorium. Checking the outside corridor just to make sure no one had seen him he saw another figure carefully slide out of another door also checking there was nobody around. It was Rutherford, who laughed and said to Born, ‘you couldn’t stand it either, let’s have a trip on the lake’. In this way they spent the rest of the day and this was the beginning of their friendship which led Rutherford to invite Born to Cambridge in 1933. Later Born moved from Cambridge up to Edinburgh. This story is a simple example of how chance decided the fate of many in these troubled times.
Eddington’s disobedient conscience
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At the outset, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was by no means universally accepted by physicists and astronomers. Its opponents were mainly those who could not bring themselves to discard the ether, the medium through which light waves were supposedly propagated; others could not swallow the tenet that time itself was relative, or that the velocity of light could not be exceeded. One of Einstein’s most fervent proselytisers in this turbulent debate was the foremost British astronomer of his time, Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944).
Eddington was painfully shy but far from modest. His illustrious pupil Subramanyam Chandrasekhar recalled overhearing a conversation between Eddington and another astronomer, Ludwig Silberstein: Silberstein believed that he himself had a firm grasp of Einstein’s theory and complimented Eddington for being one of the three people in the world to understand it. When Eddington hesitated Silberstein asked why he was flaunting his false modesty. ‘Not at all,’ came the reply, ‘I am trying to think who the third one might be.’ Eddington was, moreover, a Quaker and a pacifist and had a strong personal sympathy for Einstein, whose condemnation of German militarism at the start of the First World War had exposed him to widespread opprobrium. It is against this background that Eddington’s determination to prove Einstein right must be seen.
The living fossil
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1938, three days before Christmas, the young curator of the small East London Museum on the eastern seaboard of South Africa was assembling a display of fossils. Her name was Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. That morning her work was interrupted by a telephone call from the harbour, where a trawler, laden with a catch that included sharks and other fish, had just docked. The trawlermen had supplied Miss Courtenay-Latimer with fish of many species for the museum’s collection. She now had a backlog of specimens from earlier catches still to be mounted and she wanted to get her fossil display finished before the Christmas holiday. She was not therefore anxious to accumulate more fish. ‘But 1 thought of how good everyone at Irvin and Johnson had been to me, and it being so near Christmas, I thought the least I could do would be to go down to the docks to wish them the compliments of the season.’
Friends and enemies
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A. V. (Archibald Vivian) Hill (1886-1977) was a physiologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for his work on the energetics of muscle. He was also, in the words of his protege (and later Nobel Laureate), Sir Bernard Katz, ‘the most naturally upright man 1 have ever known’. Hill strove all his life to right political wrongs—to curb the excesses of chauvinism that disfigured relations between intellectuals in the opposing countries during and after the First World War, and to give succour to scholars displaced from Nazi Germany before the Second. A story from his collection of essays and memoirs recalls some of the absurdities that sprang from the nationalistic passions engendered by the Great War.
It was known since the early years of the twentieth century that the metabolic end-product of muscle activity is lactic acid, which accumulates in large amount with fatigue. What was not then fully understood was how the muscle recovers, and what, in particular, happens to all the lactic acid. Was it eliminated by oxidation or was it recycled through metabolic reactions into the carbohydrate from which it had been formed?
Hybrid vigour
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Science has generated its own vocabulary, loosely rooted in the classical languages. But neologisms today are less scrupulously coined than in the era when the ancient languages were universally taught. Jacques Barzun, the American scholar, has recalled the lament of a university president, deploring the introduction of the Bachelor of Science degree: it would not, he said, ensure that the students knew science, but it would certainly ensure that they knew no Latin. Mixed derivations, in those more learned days, were anathema. An Oxford historian was supposed to have remarked when television arrived that no good would ever come of an invention the name of which was half in Latin and half in Greek.
In old age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who wrote and theorized widely about science (and is now remembered for his elaborate, but incorrect, theory of colour vision), was reported to have had the following illuminating exchange with his disciple, Johann Peter Eckermann: the latter related to his master one day that he had been present at the demonstration of a remarkable new invention. It was a steam carriage, or automobile, which could propel itself without horses. Goethe pondered long over this remarkable apparition, and presently summoned Eckermann again. It was surely, he pronounced, Eckermann’s little joke, for if such a contrivance had indeed been invented it could not have been given so grotesque a name: it would have been called an autokineticon, or otherwise perhaps an ipsornobile.
Science in extremis and the phosphorescent toothpaste
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
With resilience and determination enough, science has been known to thrive even in a prisoner-of-war camp [35]. James Chadwick (1891-1974), who was to win a Nobel Prize for the discover)’ of the neutron, kept boredom and frustration at bay in a German prison camp during the First World War by experimenting in an improvised laboratory. Chadwick was born into the working class in the north of England and suffered in his early years from a crippling shyness. But his talents were recognized by a schoolmaster and he won a scholarship to what is now the University of Manchester. There he came to the notice of the recently appointed professor of physics, Ernest Rutherford [16], whom he later followed to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
One of Rutherford’s cleverest associates was Hans Geiger (who gave his name to the Geiger counter, still used to detect radioactive emissions). When Geiger returned to his native Germany, Chadwick arranged to spend a year with him in Berlin. That year was 1914. Chadwick was given some bad advice by the local branch of the travel agent, Thomas Cook, and in consequence was forced to endure nearly five years of internment under conditions of great privation in a makeshift camp on the race course at Ruheleben, outside Berlin. In time a group of the prisoners formed a Science Circle and, tiring of lecturing to each other, asked their captors for space to set up a laboratory. In the autumn of ] 915 they were given part of a loft in a stable block. The temperature touched -10 °C in winter and rose to 37 °C at the height of summer, but the prisoners persisted. Lamps fuelled with animal fat gave light and a little heat.
Humphry Davy gives himself airs
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Humphry Davy earned his seat in the scientific pantheon by a remarkable succession of discoveries, extending from sodium and potassium to the miners’ safety lamp and Michael Faraday, whom he engaged as keeper of the laboratory records and inducted into the mysteries of scientific research. Davy got his start in natural philosophy, as science was then called, in 1798, when at the age of 19 he was appointed assistant in Dr Thomas Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. Beddoes, chemist, physician, and polymath, was something of a public figure, thanks to his well-advertised demonstrations of ‘factitious airs’-the recently discovered gases, of which nitrous oxide, laughing gas, excited the greatest interest. Beddoes had high hopes of therapeutic uses for the gases. He even believed that gases emitted by cattle might cure tuberculosis and into his patients’ sick room he piped effluvium from both ends of cows, which he kept on an adjoining lawn.
Truth stranger than fiction
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Aspirin is by a huge margin the most abundantly used of all drugs and new aspects of its multifarious beneficent activity are still coming to light. Its name derives from the willow tree, which was known from the earliest times to harbour in its bark an analgesic principle. Legend has it that this was first recognized when bears with broken or infected teeth were seen to strip and chew the bark. The active compound was identified in the nineteenth century as salicylic acid, but it soon transpired that the acid or its salt, sodium salicylate, a cheap and easily prepared chemical, while effective in suppressing pain, was intolerably bitter and also caused stomach disorders. Chemists at the German pharmaceutical concern, F. Bayer and Company, therefore set about synthesizing simple derivatives of salicylic acid. All accounts of the discovery of aspirin— acetylsalicylic acid—concur that it was prepared by a young chemist at the Bayer works by the name of Felix Hoffmann. His inspiration was the suffering of his father, crippled and in continuous pain from rheumatoid arthritis. Hoffmann made a pure preparation, which instantly relieved his father’s worst discomfort, and after evaluation by the Bayer pharmacologist, Heinrich Dreser, aspirin reached the market in 1898.
Pasteur wields the tweezers
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The young Louis Pasteur [172] came to fame with one of the most spectacular experiments in the history of science. While studying the chemistry of fermentation he fell to pondering the nature of optical activity [1]—an attribute of most compounds produced by living organisms.
One of the products of the fermentation of grape juice is tartaric acid. Its formula was already known and it had also been shown that, when purified from the ferment, solutions of the acid and its salts rotated the plane of polarized light to the left (or are said to be laevorotatory). Yet when a substance with the same formula was prepared in the laboratory by an organic chemist the solutions had no optical activity at all. This form of tartaric acid was known as racemic acid. Pasteur arrived at the inspired conjecture that racemic acid was a mixture (now called a racemic mixture) of equal parts of left- and right-rotating components. The salts of racemic acid, such as the sodium ammonium salt (for the acid possesses two acid groups), form handsome crystals and when Pasteur examined them under a lens he perceived that there were two forms, related to each other as a pair of mirror images. He picked out the two types of crystal with tweezers, dissolved them in water, and, indeed, the two solutions had opposite rotatory powers: they were dextro- and laevorotatory.
The limits of logic
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1931, an intellectual bombshell exploded in the sheltered world of mathematics. The perpetrator of the outrage was a young German, Kurt Godel (1906-78), and the most illustrious of the casualties David Hilbert [11], doyen of German mathematicians. The Hilbert Project, as it was called, had the aim of establishing a complete system of axioms from which all of mathematics could eventually be rigorously developed. (Remote from everyday reality as such a preoccupation might appear, this, like other researches of Hilbert’s and Gödel’s, proved to have a profound bearing on topics in science and even technology.) Godel proved by highly rarified mathematical reasoning, making use of paradoxes, that for some of the most important areas of mathematics no complete set of axioms can be formulated. This ‘incompleteness theorem’ essentially put an end to Hilbert’s vision and made Godel famous.
Boyle on the boil
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Hon. Robert Boyle (1627-91) once described, to Samuel Pepys’s vast amusement, as ‘son of the Earl of Cork and father of modern chymistry’, played a large part in turning chemistry into a rational science. His influential book The Sceptical Chymist set out his quantitative credo. Boyle’s Law, relating the pressure to the volume of a gas, is familiar to all schoolchildren and was first expounded in 1662 in a tract with the title A Defence of the Doctrine touching the Spring and Weight of the Air. But Boyle never shook off his fascination with alchemy. He was one of the many attracted by the vision of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, the substance that would transmute base metals into gold. In their search for the secret of transmutation the alchemists made many important discoveries, of which perhaps the most spectacular was the isolation of phosphorus. Boyle and others had been much engrossed by ‘phosphoruses’, a term applied to all substances that glowed in the dark. These included certain minerals, the ignis fatuus, or will-o’-the-wisp, which was supposed to lure unwary travellers into treacherous marshes, and many biological organisms, such as fireflies, luminescent planktons, and saprophytic bacteria, which feed on decaying plant and animal matter.
Ferreting out a virus
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Research on the viruses of the common cold and flu became possible only when the first such virus was cultured in the laboratory. For many years these rhinoviruses, as they are called, resisted all such endeavours. Success finally came at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. A group of researchers there had been trying everything they knew, inoculating many species of animals—guinea-pigs, mice, rabbits, hamsters, hedgehogs, and monkeys—with throat garglings from human flu patients and lung tissue taken at autopsy from victims of the disease. These preparations were injected into abdomens, brains, and testes, all to no avail.
Then in 1933, Wilson Smith decided to try his preparations on ferrets, which were being used in the same laboratory for studies on dog distemper. Moreover, he thought of what in retrospect seems the obvious course of administering the virus through the nose. Smith inoculated two ferrets with washings from the throat of one of his colleagues, who had gone down with flu. A few days later Smith recorded in his notebook: ‘Ferret I looks somewhat seedy—crusts round the nose and slight discharge with suggestion of pus—eyes also watery, sneezing.’ Ferret II was soon similarly afflicted. Not long thereafter, Smith himself caught flu, it was thought because one of the ferrets had sneezed in his face. The virus recovered from Smith’s throat turned out indeed to be the strain that was thriving in the ferret and not the one spreading that winter through the human population. And so transmission of the virus from man to ferret and back to man was established, and the so-called WS strain became the classic vehicle for research on flu.
The last of the true amateurs
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Science, and especially physics, has become too specialized and too expensive to shelter amateurs. The de Broglie brothers, Louis (who first gave expression to the particle-wave duality [113]), and especially his elder brother, the due Maurice de Broglie, were among the last.
Louis-Cesar-Victor-Maurice de Broglie (1875-1960) was born into an ancient and illustrious French family; the diplomatic corps and the army were the only careers thought fitting for the scion of such a noble line, and it was only after delicate negotiations with his grandfather, the head of the clan, that he was per mitted to enter the navy. Posted to the Mediterranean fleet, his scientific bent soon asserted itself: it was Maurice de Broglie who installed the first shipboard wireless on a French warship. But he became restless at the limited opportunities for indulging his interests and asked leave to resign from the navy and devote himself to science. The grandfather was scandalized: science was an amusement for old men and not an occupation for a de Broglie. But, after pleading his case, it was agreed that the young Maurice might convert a room in the family hôtel in Paris into a laboratory in which to amuse himself when not at sea. It was only after the patriarch’s death that Maurice, then 33, finally felt able to resign his commission (although he returned to work on submarine communications for the duration of the First world War). He then studied spectroscopy at the College de France and completed a thesis under a distinguished physicist, Paul Langevin, with whom he had worked on the submarine project. Thereafter Maurice de Broglie withdrew to his superbly equipped private laboratory, where he was joined by a succession of assistants, including his brother, Louis, who later won a Nobel prize. The Swiss crystallographer, P. P. Ewald, told in a lecture in 1953 that:
Koch on cooking
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), one of the founders of medicinal chemistry, is famous for inventing the first effective anti-microbial agent and the first drug to combat syphilis without the side-effects that were as destructive as the disease. One of his great discoveries was the so-called ‘acid-fast’ staining procedure for tubercle bacilli. This came about quite accidentally. The bacilli, which have a fatty coating, had resisted all attempts at detection by staining, until one day Ehrlich left a preparation on the laboratory stove. It must have been an unexpectedly cold day, for a member of the laboratory lit the stove. Ehrlich’s dish was heated, the bacteria absorbed the hot staining compound, and came up in bold colour under Ehrlich’s microscope. Robert Koch, the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus, wrote: ‘we owe it to this circumstance alone that it has become the general custom to search for the bacillus in sputum.’ This quickly established itself as the universal diagnostic method.