August 05, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Men who Bowditch Worked With
About making new discoveries Bernard wrote
the following:
“Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is
the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and
just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes
at once their sole torment and their sole happiness.
A man of science rises ever, in seeking
truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless
very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are
precisely what constitutes science.”
So it was a man of the stature of Claude
Bernard that Henry Pickering Bowditch went to work with in 1868 in Paris after
the end of the American Civil War.
Over there he encountered and worked along
with distinguished physiologists, anatomists and histologists such as:
(a) Louis-Antoine Ranvier (the nodes of
Ranvier which are the gaps in the myelin sheath of axons where the axolemma is
exposed to the extracellular space has been named after him) and
(b) Etienne-Jules Marey from whom he learnt
the art of chrono-photography (pictures shot in quick successions so as to
capture motion) and laboratory photography.
Such men engaging in fundamental and
cellular biology were then nonexistent in the entire Americas and most
certainly in the United States of America which had been devastated by the four
bloody years of war between the Union and the Confederate armies.
It is a strange fact that though wars come
at an enormous cost of both resources and humans it has been noted that they
also tend to greatly accelerate technological development for the purpose of
solving specific military needs.
Radar, satellites, lasers, internet and
computers themselves are some of the examples that come to my mind that were
primarily military technologies that were later adapted to various civilian
uses as an afterthought.
Now these military technologies are so
completely integrated with the lives of an average Jane that one finds it hard
to recall that they had their origins in the much despised wars and armed
conflicts that we build memorials to refresh our memories hoping against their
repetitions.
I am not sure how that turned out to be the
case in the specific matter of American Civil War but the prolonged
Reconstruction Era that followed it nationwide surely would have called for great
ingenuity, massive industrialization, investment in education and infrastructure,
taxation laws and of course a complete overhaul of black civil rights.
Bowditch then also spent some time with
German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne who is known for his study of retina and the
photochemical changes that take inside it when light falls on it.
Kühne is also famous in medicine and
physiology for coining the term “enzyme”.
Kühne succeeded Hermann von Helmholtz in
1871 after he left the department of physiology of Heidelberg University in
Baden for Humboldt University in Berlin.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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