August 15, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
What Bowditch Returned With from Leipzig
Ludwig had meticulous surgical hands and he
insisted that his pupils take great effort and utmost care in planning before carrying
out animal experimentation.
There were two reasons for this direction.
One was to get accurate data out of
experiments since error in experimentation would lead to faulty conclusions.
Second and equally importantly was to
minimize suffering on the animals subjected to experimentation and for which he
also advocated use of adequate anesthesia.
Ludwig lab was beginning to provide the
world data that would in the future enable pathologic laboratories to proliferate
at every nook and corner of third-world cities such as Bombay and Buenos Aires.
Biological processes were being scrutinized
under the optics of Newtonian mechanics using basic laws of physics and
hydraulics and were being converted into digits, equations and formulas.
The papers that churned out from Ludwig’s
lab were mostly original and all of them carried the name of the student as their
first author.
This was in spite of the fact that it was
the professor Ludwig who used to be instrumental (pun intended) in every
investigation that was carried out in his laboratory.
Nearly every investigation was supervised
by Ludwig and yet he was not greedy so as to usurp the authorships of these
papers.
Ludwig drew students from all across Europe
who would later imbibe his experimentation methods and take them back to their
home countries to propagate the experimental techniques.
One of such students of Ludwig was the
American graduate of Harvard who had recently participated in the American
Civil War for the Union Army Henry Pickering Bowditch.
Bowditch during his time with Carl Ludwig
has shown his seriousness in research by improving upon the model of kymograph
that was then in use in the laboratory.
On his return to Harvard (yes, he did
return to the United States and not settle down in Germany which suggests he
had hope his nation would not disappoint him unlike the Hindus who are highly
jingoistic overseas but scared to return to their homeland – a cognitive
dissonance that they fail to realize existing in their central processing unit)
he emulated in almost to the last detail what he had witnessed at the Ludwig
lab at Leipzig.
Before sailing for Boston Bowditch
purchased several experimental apparatuses that he thought he would need to set
up his lab back at Harvard.
You can imagine the condition of the United
States then when an American budding scientist had to purchase scientific
instruments from a foreign country.
Scientific knowledge/novel techniques and
laboratory apparatuses were not the only stuff that Bowditch returned with from
Leipzig.
Just days before his departure from Leipzig
to Boston he quite dramatically married a local woman by the name of Selma
Knuth.
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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