The Metaphysical Storm: Wöhler’s Challenge to Science

Number of words: 164 In 1828, a Berlin scientist named Friedrich Wöhler had sparked a metaphysical storm in science by boiling ammonium cyanate, a plain, inorganic salt, and creating urea, a chemical typically produced by the kidneys. The Wöhler experiment—seemingly trivial—had enormous implications. Urea was a “natural” chemical, while its precursor was an inorganic salt. … Read more

The Alchemy of Cotton

Number of words: 767 The story begins with colonialism and its chief loot: cotton. In the mid 1850s, as ships from India and Egypt laden with bales of cotton unloaded their goods in English ports, cloth milling boomed into a spectacularly successful business in England, an industry large enough to sustain an entire gamut of … Read more

The Journey from Pitchblende to Radium

Number of words: 168 In a waste ore called pitchblende, a black sludge that came from the peaty forests of Joachimsthal in what is now the Czech Republic, the Curies found the first signal of a new element—an element many times more radioactive than uranium. The Curies set about distilling the boggy sludge to trap … Read more

The Anatomy of Surgical Decisions in Breast Cancer Treatment

Number of words: 474 Moore’s hypothesis had an obvious corollary. If breast cancer relapsed due to the inadequacy of the original surgical excisions, then even more breast tissue should be removed during the initial operation. Since the margins of extirpation were the problem, then why not extend the margins? Moore argued that surgeons, attempting to … Read more

The Revolutionary Era of Surgery: 1846 to 1867

Number of words: 644 In the brief span between 1846 and 1867, two discoveries swept away these two quandaries that had haunted surgery, thus allowing cancer surgeons to revisit the bold procedures that Hunter had tried to perfect in London. The first of these discoveries, anesthesia, was publicly demonstrated in 1846 in a packed surgical … Read more

The Unseen Struggles of a Nocturnal Researcher

Number of words: 195 The proximity to medicine paid off. Subbarao made friends and connections at the hospital and switched to a day job as a researcher in the Division of Biochemistry. His initial project involved purifying molecules out of living cells, dissecting them chemically to determine their compositions— in essence, performing a biochemical “autopsy” … Read more

The Science Behind Human Tissue Growth

Number of words: 157 The two tenets might have seemed simplistic, but they allowed Virchow to propose a crucially important hypothesis about the nature of human growth. If cells only arose from other cells, then growth could occur in only two ways: either by increasing cell numbers or by increasing cell size. Virchow called these … Read more