History of Science

Think H1N1 is Old News? The Original Innoculation Campaign

Emma Jacobs — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:26:24 +0000

This week (January 10-16), as part of National Influenza Vaccination Week, the Center for Disease Control will launch a national campaign of events and information dissemination to encourage Americans to get vaccinated against the flu. This year, of course, the campaign includes a rousing campaign against H1N1, including podcasts, factsheets, PSAs, and a flyer of President Obama receiving his flu shot.

Despite the epic levels of hoopla, public health campaigns for immunization are not new.

The very first systematic inoculation campaign in the New World was fought against smallpox. Smallpox, also known as variola had been a worldwide plague for centuries and various efforts at inoculation had been attempted over the years. These included various efforts to introduce mild infections in healthy patients.

With the systematization of public health procedures came more formal campaigns to disseminate information on treating and preventing the disease.

In 1702, concerned about a possible outbreak of Smallpox in the city of Boston, Benjamin Elliot reprinted a typical pamphlet of information on the disease. Thomas Thacher had authored A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People of New-England How to Order Themselves & Theirs in the Small-pocks, or Measels following a previous epidemic in the city 1676-1677. The pamphlet outlines the disease’s causes, symptoms and treatment, as best understood at the time of publication.

However, epidemics would continue to resurface and a variety of efforts followed in response, at the urging of figures from Cotton Mather to George Washington.

The definitive event in the American campaign against Small pox came in 1800 with the entry into the field of Doctor Benjamin Waterhouse. A professor at Harvard’s new school of medicine, Waterhouse began championing the inoculation research of Dr. Edward Jenner of England. Jenner had discovered that controlled infection with a mild case of cowpox offered immunity against the more serious, related disease of smallpox.

Waterhouse began by testing the method on his own children and servants. Weeks later, he began widely publishing accounts of his success in preventing infection. The aggressive dissemination of Waterhouse’s writings and smallpox samples around the country prove a turning point, launching a century and more of efforts to eradicate the disease, including both government initiatives and public information campaigns.

Inoculation, enforced by the government in Europe, encountered greater obstacles in the freewheeling United States–made greater by reported infections with actual cases of smallpox. Harper’s weekly printed a sketch by Sol Eytinge, “Vaccinating the Baby,” on February 19, 1870, along with the following caption:

We trust the hint conveyed indirectly by this picture may not be lost upon families where this necessary precaution against a loathsome disease has been neglected. The sanitary superintendent of the Metropolitan District of New York, in a recent report, called attention to the fact that this disease has become fearfully prevalent throughout the West, especially in California, and that great precaution will be necessary to keep it from spreading through New York.

Eventually, the vaccine proponents could announce success. In the twentieth century, after worldwide vaccination campaigns the WHO finally declared the eradication of the disease in 1980, considered one of the major victories of modern medicine. Around that time, vaccination for smallpox also ended.

The First Modern Environmental Battle Over Lake Thirlmere

Emma Jacobs — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:26:33 +0000

Manchester’s industrial economy was growing. The city’s population continued to rise, having more than tripled in the first half of the nineteenth century. Standards of hygiene had also begun to improve with better understandings of the roots of disease and demands of public health. However, amidst all this good news, the city had encountered a growing problem: a shortage of water.

The solution proposed by city leaders in 1877 involved the damming of Lake Thirlmere, 100 miles away, to create a reservoir for the city of Manchester. Before long, supporters of the lake responded, forming the Thirlmere Defense Association.

Harriet Ritvo, author of the recently published The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, argues that the conflict that resulted between these two parties constitutes the first battle of the modern environmental movement. Industry versus a cadre of activists attached to the lake for its environmental beauty and significance but without particular personal attachments to the area.

In the 1870s, Lake Thirlmere remained bucolic, relatively pristine and undeveloped. It lay at the heart of England’s Lake District, the crown jewel of England’s walking culture.

Essayist Rebecca Solnit has written in “Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars” that, whether or not the taste for the country evolved because or independently of dense cities like Manchester, it had assumed a lasting importance in British life:

Walking has a resonance, a cultural weight, [in Great Britain] that it does nowhere else. On summer Sundays, more than eighteen million Britons head for the country, and ten million say they walk for recreation…The American magazine Walking is nothing but a health and fitness publication aimed at women…but Britain has half a dozen outdoor magazines in which walking is about the beauty of the landscape rather than the body.

The early environmental advocates of this era fought to preserve these landscapes and they pleasure they took from them.

In contrast, a supporter of the Manchester dam, John Bateman, criticized the Thirlmere activists’ “sentimental idea that it was sacrilege to invade the precincts of the lakes for any such utilitarian purpose as giving a supply of fresh water to famishing thousands of the manufacturing districts.”

Harriet Ritvo compares Lake Thirlmere of 1853 to the Lake Thirlmere of today

In the end, the Manchester argument won. The Thirlmere Defense Association could only delay the dam project, which won final approval in 1879 and was complete fifteen years later.

In the years since the damming of Thirlmere, Ritvo has argued in interviews, debates like this one have shifted. More information about environmental impacts newly overpowers arguments over utility versus aesthetics. However, beneath current environmental disputes, over water supplies in California or climate change, she sees familiar outlines.

Ritvo told MIT’s Spectrum: “Giving something its historical depth can unveil the difficulty of a problem. You can see why compromise happens so seldom. The ideological commitments of the different perspectives are so strong, and often both very compelling. History helps us understand where opposing positions come from, what their roots are.”

The ‘Roots’ of Climate-Gate

Emma Jacobs — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:07:18 +0000

Remains of the famous Oseberg ship burial, which Bonde and Stylegar were able to date in the 1990s.

Today, a lot goes into counting tree rings, as we can tell from the back and forth over the statistics and ‘tricks’ of Climate-gate. Rep. Ed Markey has remarked efforts to understand what happened with the important record of historical temperature at the controversy’s heart risk devolving into a ‘Siberian tree ring circus.’

However, the science at stake has relatively humble beginnings in the work of one sort of unlikely character by the name of Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an astronomer pouring over tree samples as early as the turn of the last century.

Douglass had established himself at the University of Arizona Tuscon to pursue his personal ambitions of discovering the effects of sunspots on the earth’s climate. To do this, first and foremost, he needed to establish an accurate record of historical climate to track alongside the 11 year cycles of our sun.

It was as a part of these studies that Douglass began looking more closely at the trees of the American Southwest. Others had guessed the growth patterns of trees might store information on historical weather patterns. Douglass’s work would firmly establish links between weather and tree growth across climate regions, based on the year-to-year variation he found in the moisture-stretches, sensitive trees available for study in Arizona.

At point, the history of science and the science of history—or how we learn about very old things using the scientific toolkit neatly overlap.

In Norway this month, you could pick up a journal called Viking : tidsskrift for norrøn arkeologi. In the latest issue, as Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist has helpfully translated, two northern researchers Niels Bonde & Frans-Arne Stylegar, have published the dates obtained for two Viking ships buried below-ground centuries ago using the science of dendochronology—more commonly known as tree-ring dating.

For ships built and put to rest this long ago (770 and 780 AD respectively) arriving at an accurate date of origin with systematic precision is not an intuitive science. Trying to date something that’s been buried underground for over a thousand years, you’re not just counting rings to find the ages of the trees that make up your find. You need to know when the trees that make up those ships, or those ornaments, or those house beams stopped growing and producing more rings.

An extraordinary 1919 edition of Douglass’s Climactic Cycles and Tree Growth, beautifully illustrated with images of the old-growth trees that produced his data explains the next step of his methodology. Douglass called cross-identification “the most fundamental and essential feature of the method of studying tree-growth.” The patterns of ring growth within trees corresponded to weather patterns year to year—higher rainfall had allowed for greater growth—but more interestingly, he had found that the same time periods in different trees from the same regions matched up.

Dendrochronological dating draws on a comprehensive chronological map constructed from samples of living and dead tree samples.

Douglass could attempt to date his first archaeological ruins not long after he developed his theory—reviewing wood samples from ruins left by Anasazi Native Americans in the Four Corners region. In the end, after decades spent ironing out gaps in his tree-ring chronology, Douglass made more headway with this methodology than in finding any links to sunspots. In the end the world of archaeology claimed him for his inadvertent contribution.

In something of a return, besides our Norwegian ship archaeologists, the tools Douglass developed have become key to establishing records of long-term climate change. Make of ‘climate-gate’ what you will, environmental scientists continue combing through tree rings and cores of arctic ice.

Iron Curtain Protected Against Species Invasions

Emma Jacobs — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:28:53 +0000

The American comb jelly was accidentally introduced into the Black Sea, to disastrous effect.

As we found in the tale last month of Eugene Schieffelin and the introduction of the American Starling to New York’s Central Park, species’ arrivals in new climes can have unusual human roots. Imagine now if you could look on a much broader scale—and see effects that decades of enforced political boundaries have had on the diversity of animal life.

A group of researchers from The Biodiversity Research Group at Hebrew University of Jerusalem have narrowed in on a unique test case: the iron curtain that bifurcated Europe throughout the Cold War. The boundary created two virtually separate regions of movement and commerce. The scientists cite striking numbers on North American trade with the Former Soviet Union. Total trade amounted to $236 million in 1946, down to $10 million in 1950 and again to under $2 million between North America and the entire community of communist nations by 1956.

In research published in the journal Conservation Biology, the team looks at the introduction of bird species during the Cold War—that also changed right along those political lines.

The results found make a certain intuitive sense. As it happens, the iron curtain did shield Eastern Europe from the arrival of new species during the Cold War decades. Far fewer ‘introduction events’ occurred in Eastern than Western Europe. For the most part, where introductions occurred in the East or the West, they tended to come from areas with which a region had open relations. Western Europe saw more birds appear from North America and Africa.

A chart of current alien species by country

After the end of the Cold War, the numbers changed again. Introductions to Eastern Europe have risen.

In the end, without delving too far into the statistics, the takeaway from this research is probably just another reminder. Peoples’ trading and travel doesn’t happen in a vacuum. They happen on a planet, and, as the researchers point out, that is unlikely to change. With the passage of time, as nations of the former Eastern Bloc become more integrated with the global economy, the scientists warn that the threat of serious species invasions has risen again.

LATimes: Creationists Handing out Re-Prefaced Origin of Species

Emma Jacobs — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:07:58 +0000

The Last Alchemist: Science in Political Times

Emma Jacobs — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:03:37 +0000

Brian Cottoir is the sort of technical guy who doesn’t have a website, but who has tapped into a hip artistic scene drawn to the unusual aesthetics of the historical science that he studies. Cotnoir is a practicing alchemist—by his own admission, one of the last of his kind.

After an hour spent speeding through several dozen slide of beautiful, alchemical illustrations at the Observatory art space a couple weeks ago, Cottoir took a question from the audience, which produced an intriguing response about the public presentation of his field.

Why, an audience member inquired, were so many of the chemical processes being described depicted in allegorical terms—a copper sulfate which heated, produced a sulfuric acid, showing up time and time again as a green lion chewing on the sun.

Cotnoir located the source of the all this symbolism somewhere between the difficult evolution of appropriate language and something more political. He pointed to an intentionally public exclusivity. Alchemists meant to communicate their meanings to the initiated. But because of the sensitivity of a science involving precious metals—which could raise fears of counterfeiting on the one hand or threats to person and property on the other—they also preferred to present a certain opacity to those outside their field.

Historian Anthony Grafton has written on fine seventeenth century science of technical chronology, the study of dates in ancient and medieval history, also “a hot field in its day.” Drawing on comparisons of dates in ancient texts across cultures, astronomical calculations, and academic conjecture, Grafton notes that these scholars crafted a very useful structure, “the basic armature of dates on which modern scholars still hand the flesh and blood of ancient and medieval history.”

But again, particularly as their art intersected with real sociopolitical interests—for example as dates failed to line up with the timeline of the Christian bible or the scholars drew on uneasily received foreign texts—chronologists often found themselves at odds with local authorities and sometimes withheld elements of their findings from the general public, preferring to correspond amongst each other by letter.

Here we see both an early networking and a collective inquiry, with its own rudimentary process of academic review. But, at the same time, in Europe of the seventeenth century, fear of a negative reception often caused scholars of various stripes to limit public defense of their work when not ready for the fight for a difficult idea, not an unfamiliar argument today.

Forty Years of Hands-On Science at the Exploratorium

Emma Jacobs — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:10:41 +0000

Remember the Exploratorium? Digging your hands in? The exhibits might display the signs of wear but they had bells, whistles, and buttons.

In September of 1969, the doors of the Palace of Fine Arts building in, a leftover of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition opened to reveal a few dozen interactive exhibits. This week marks the beginning of festivities to mark the anniversary of the San Francisco science museum, which turned out—as things which open to no fanfare often do—to have done some something groundbreaking. Belatedly, it has beceme the symbol for a movement.

The emergence of hands-on science education owed as much to the educational ethos of John Dewey as it did to the political throes surrounding the launch of Lunik, whose anniversary we also marked this year. In other words, the museum, founded by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s disgraced younger brother, Frank, owed as much to the progressive field Frank was blacklisted for associating with as to any aggressively patriotic element of American society. But the launch of the Soviet Union’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, proved the spark to the canon of education reform.

In large part, American’s shock at the launch of Sputnik came at finding themselves and their country onlookers, as Soviet engineers and scientists sent a rocket into space. The ensuing weeks and months sent a wave of politicians and public figures wading into the public debate on the means to rescue American science. President Eisenhower was attacked for the failure of the science program. Members of Congress travelled to the Soviet Union to make observations. In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense and Education Act. The text would read:

[Congress] finds and declares that the security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women. . .The defense of this Nation depends upon the mastery of modern techniques developed from complex scientific principles. . .It depends as well upon the discovery and development of new principles, new techniques, and new knowledge.

Legislation sped money to the National Science Foundation, universities and private researchers—and to elementary education in science and mathematics.

The Exploratorium stands as testament to that interest and investment. “The interactivity was a creative expression of the desire to interest kids in science and engineering,” says David Hoffman. He directed the documentary, The Sputnik Moment, and grew up during this era in Levittown, New York. Hoffman recalls the changes that descended on his own school—new science projects and finally the end to the quadruple-sessions in place to deal with overcrowding.

“There were Oppenheimers everywhere,” Hoffman says. He describes the movement to remake classrooms as a grassroots one, propelled nationwide by parents and educators as often as by lawmakers.

Since this era began, we still debate new math, and the extent of improvements in the intervening years, but, Hoffman argues, the changes were unmistakable. “All of a sudden geeks were respected—though there wasn’t the term geek at the time.”

Claude Shannon: Navigating The Maze of Mechanical Memory

Emma Jacobs — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:06:59 +0000

The difference between genius and obsession is often a close call.

Claude Shannon, the subject of a career retrospective opening next week at the German Computer Museum in Paterborn, demonstrated the kind of infinite technical curiosity that would propel his most inspired work, at its most applied and esoteric. “I’ve spent lots of time,” he once said, “on totally useless things.”

In 1952, Time magazine visited Shannon and his mechanical mouse, Theseus, in Murray Hill, New Jersey at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Shannon, who, in the dry summary of the MIT Museum (Shannon eventually ended up teaching at MIT), “wrote a landmark paper that proposed that all data communication could be reduced to ones and zeroes,” was also known for whimsical and ingenious machines, combining eccentricity with technical brilliance in exploration of an idea. Time reported:

Bell Telephone’s labyrinth is about half as big as a desk top and is fitted with aluminum partitions which can be shifted around among 40 different slots. Theseus himself has only a mouse-shaped wooden body, three small wheels and whiskers of copper wire. Inside him is nothing but a bar-magnet. His brains are outside him, under the floor of the labyrinth. They are a complicated array of relays.

At the Bell Laboratories, after Theseus’s first halting attempt to navigate the labyrinth—“He blunders around, bumping his copper whiskers against the aluminum walls,” the mouse makes a second attempt, this time moving with confident speed through the maze.

Theseus in the last analysis isn’t much of a mouse. The explanation for his smart behavior lies in the relays, which move him around by means of a motor-driven magnet. They remember all his successful moves. So when he makes his second trip, the relays whisk him without an error along the correct path.

Dr. Shannon has a good time with Theseus and seems much attached to him, but he did not create the mouse and his labyrinth just for fun. They are useful in studying telephone switching systems, which are very like labyrinths. In effect, each telephone call is a mouse that has to find its way to the cheese (the called telephone) in the shortest possible time.

In 1959, It Was Russia Who Struck the Moon

Emma Jacobs — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:31:16 +0000

On September 12, 1959, the day before Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev was scheduled to fly to Washington, President Eisenhower was in a helicopter heading towards for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Upon landing, he received the news that the Soviet Union had launched a multi-stage rocket from the steppes of Kazahkstan.

By the time the news went out over the AP wire, the Soviet rocket had travelled more than 125,000 miles from earth—more than half the distance from the earth to the moon. Russian radio foretold that the satellite would plant the hammer and sickle on the lunar surface immediately preceding Kruschev’s arrival on American soil. The capsule carried instruments to gather information on the moon’s magnetic poles, the earth’s radiation belt, cosmic radiation and the gaseous makeup of interplanetary substances.

Dominance of the skies was still in play and information on earth came at a premium. The Los Angeles Times reported there was “no announcement of any passenger, either human or animal. The weight of the instrument package suggested a man, or even a dob, would seem to be out of the question.” In Moscow, people packed Red Square to listen to a broadcast of the satellite’s even beeps until the rocket made impact among three depressions known as the Seas of Serenity, Tranquility and Vapors. When the spacecraft finally impacted the lunar surface, it scattered 150 badges of the hammer and sickle and a plaque to mark the impact: USSR, September 1959. Signals from the rocket ended upon impact.

Photo: Russian stamp commemorating the impact of the Luna II spacecraft

Shakespeare’s Songbirds Darken American Skies

Emma Jacobs — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:51:11 +0000

Of the six hundred birds that appear in Shakespeare, the starling appears only once, in Act I of Henry IV. Shakespeare named more than 600 birds in his complete works, among them the eagle (forty mentions) and the wren (nine mentions). However, despite its diminutive presence in the lines of the bard, the common starling has caused an outsize problem in the lands Europeans had just begun to explore in Shakespeare’s day.

In the 1890s, Eugene Schieffelin, an eccentric druggist and literary enthusiast, notoriously released one hundred starlings in Central Park, determined that it should hold every bird that appeared in the pages of Shakespeare. Joe DiCostanzo, bird specialist for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, has observed that purposeful introductions of foreign species occurred frequently in the 1800s, often initiated by societies of zoological enthusiasts.

Schieffelin chaired the American Acclimatization Society, which had already released starlings under his direction in the 1870s, along with some Japanese finches. The finches did not thrive, but the starlings eventually took off beyond the park. Today, the starling population numbers among the most common birds in the United States. The dark, round birds, described as noisy in the United States or gregarious if you’re from England, also number among North America’s most notorious pests, becoming aggressive around native species.

Starlings can also pose a serious threat to people. The landing of the jetliner in the Hudson in January after an avian collision came as a surprise to many. The guilty parties in the Hudson crash were geese, but starlings are also a notable culprit in airline collisions, referred to as “feathered bullets” for their high-density build and ubiquity in the Northeastern skies.

The U.S. government trapped or poisoned 1.7 million of the birds last year, to no avail. As environmental writer Kim Todd notes, in Henry the IV the starling was presented not as a gift but as a curse.

The definitive text on birds and the bard is Birds of Shakespeare written by Sir Archibald Geikie in 1916. In our digital age, you can read the complete work online.

Photo: flickr/ r.i.c.h.