History of carnitine

Carnitine was first isolated from meat extract by Gulewitsch and Krimberg as well as Kutscher in 1905 and was first thought to be involved with muscle function. Its structure was not established until 1927.

Gulewitsch and Krimberg identified the structure of carnitine as 3-hydroxy-4-N-trimethyl-aminobutyric-acid (C7H15NO), which was later confirmed in 1927 by Tomita and Sendju.

Then, another 20 years elapsed before Fraenkel, in 1947, while investigating the role of folic acid in the nutrition of insects found that the meal worm (Tenebrio molitor) required a growth factor present in yeast. Without carnitine, the meal worms could not use fat stores when starved.

In 1955, two observations further substantiated carnitine’s role in fat metabolism. Fritz showed that carnitine stimulated fatty acid oxidation in liver slices and liver homogenates. Fraenkel and Friedman found that carnitine could be reversibly acetylated by acetyl coenzyme A (CoA).

Fraenkel called this factor ‘Vitamin BT’; vitamin B because of its water soluble property, and the T standing for Tenebrio. Because of not being recognized as a vitamin, the name was subsequently changed to carnitine.

The word carnitine is derived from Latin word carno or carnis, which means flesh or meat.
History of carnitine

History of aspirin

Salicylic acid, a component on the bark of willow tree is aspirin’s precursor.

In Greece the father do medicine, Hippocrates, recommended using the bark of the willow tree as an analgesic. The active ingredient of this bark, called salicin, a bitter glycoside of salicylic alcohol, was first isolated by Leroux in 1827.

Charles Frederich von Gerhant in France and Karl Johann Kraut in Germany synthesized aspirin in 1853 and 1869 respectively.  Charles Frederich had studied acetylating reactions and first produced aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid)  in 1853 by the treatment of sodium salicylate with acetyl chloride.

He also studied the alkaline hydrolysis of aspirin to acetic and salicylic acids and the reaction of the latter with silver oxide. Kolbe and Lautemann made synthetic salicylic acid from phenol in 1860.

In 1897, Felix Hoffman at Bayer prepared a more pure form of aspirin using an improved route.

After aspirin’s success in clinics, Heindrich Dreser discovered that aspirin is a pro-drug of salicylic acid. In 1949, Gibson described his successful use of aspirin in a small group do patients with vascular problems.

Around the same time, Lawrence Craven in California realized that his tonsillectomy patients who had take a chewable aspirin preparation for pain relief were more likely that other to bleed.

In 1971, John R. Vane at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences of the University of London and the Royal College of Surgeon of England discovered that aspirin works by blocking cyclooxygenase, thus preventing the synthesis of prostaglandins.
History of aspirin

Recording nerve impulses by Joseph Erlanger

In 1848, Emil du Bois-Reymond used a galvanometer to measure currents in muscles. In 1926, Edgar Adrian took advantage of the amplification of a tube amplifier to measure single nerve impulses.

Erlanger is a US physiologist who, in collaboration with Herbert Spencer Gasser, developed techniques for recording nerve impulses using a cathode ray oscilloscope in 1922 in St. Louis.

While working at Johns Hopkins University, he created a sphygmomanometer, and instrument for measuring blood pressure.  It was the arrival if Gasser, one of his former students, that ignited his interest in the study of the conduction of nervous impulses.

They performed their research in a humidified frog nerve kept at a constant temperature. For this work and its continuation by Erlanger and Gasser separately in later years, they were in 1944 jointly awarded a Nobel Prize.

It can be regarded as the first major discovery in neurophysiology coming from the New World.

Further progress came with the introduction of intracellular in the middle decades of the 20th century by Gilbert Ling, Ralph Girard, Kenneth Cole, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley.
Recording nerve impulses by Joseph Erlanger

Ozone layer in history

The ozone layer forms a thin shield in the stratosphere, approximately 20-40 km above the earth’s surface, protecting life below the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.

In 1840, Swiss chemist Christian Schöenbein identifies the gas as a component of the lower atmosphere and named it as ‘ozone’. The word is from Greek word azein, ‘to smell’.  This meaning comes from ozone at the ground level, which gives off a pungent, acrid odor.

He presented a letter entitled ‘Research on the Nature of the odor in certain chemical reactions was presented to the Academies des Sciences in Paris.’

In 1845, Auguste de la Rive and Jean-Charles de Marignac suggest ozone is a form of oxygen. It was confirmed by Thomas Andrews in 1856.

In 1924, Gordon M B Dobson invented first dynamic measurements, a new spectrophotometer to measure the amount of ozone in the atmosphere.

He discovered that there were day-to-day fluctuations in the ozone amount over Oxford, England and that there was a regular seasonal variation.

He correctly concluded that stratospheric winds must play an important role in transporting ozone around the globe.

In 1930, an English scientist named Sydney Chapman attempted to explain how ozone was formed and destroyed in the atmosphere.

He postulated a simple three-step mechanism involving production of atomic oxygen via sunlight, followed by reaction of atomic oxygen with oxygen molecules to produce ozone.
Ozone layer in history

History of Cavendish laboratory

The Cavendish Laboratory is probably one of the most famous scientific institutions in the world.

The Royal Commission on the University having in 1850 published evidence of the needs of science.

Established in 1871, at a time when Cambridge University was being reformed by Parliament, the Cavendish Laboratory initially met with stiff resistance from those who sought to maintain the prestige and reputation of the Mathematical Tripos.

Construction work began soon after and Cavendish Laboratory was formally opened on June 16, 1874. The laboratory became the site of the natural sciences practical examinations and starting with the Lent term of 1877, also became the site of the Elementary Experimental Lectures.

The Laboratory cost about £ 6,300 and the family name of Cavendish had been linked with science in the person of the great Henry Cavendish came forward and offered to bear the cost of the building.

The professorship was established in 1871.

The Cavendish Laboratory officially became a graduate school in 1895. Ernest Rutherford was among the first advanced students to arrive at the lab, soon to be followed by other of great talent, including a few guests from the United States.
History of Cavendish laboratory

Scientific history of electricity

For ancient Greeks until the end of the 18th entry, the only form of electricity that could be studied under controlled conditions was static electricity, generated by rubbing glass with a fabric such as silk.

Electricity was rediscovered during the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1600, William Gilbert a British natural Philosopher in his book dealing with Earth as a magnet, he used term electricam, a Latin term that would serve as the basis for the English world ‘electricity’, ‘electric’, and ‘electrical’.

In his text, Gilbert tried to separate electricity from magnetism.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), demonstrated with his kite, and key experiment that lightning is an electrical phenomenon, thus proving that electricity exists in nature.

Franklin was internationally recognized for his research on electricity, and through his work, he invented the much needed lightning rod.

Technological applications from batteries and from the new understanding of electrical phenomena they engendered evolved in the early 19th century.

Volta of Italy, Oersted of Denmark, Ohm of Germany, Ampere of France and Faraday of Britain, whose investigations in the early 19th century established sufficient scientific understanding of electricity to suggest practical application.

Thomas Edison put electricity to work. Until Edison perfected the electric lamp in 1879, all light sources came from open flames that created soot, heat and often fire.

Practical applications emerged from the 1830s onwards, on a steadily expanding front. The first was the electric telegraph, powered initially by batteries. Then came arc-lighting, telephone, light bulb and electric motor.
Scientific history of electricity

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been a world leader in space research from the earliest days of the subject. 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory began life in 1936 as a semi-official group attached to Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. It started as off campus facility used by several Caltech graduate students to conduct rocket propulsion experiments.

Until the transfer of its jurisdiction to NASA in late 1958, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was under the jurisdiction of the US Army.

With the growing fears of the Cold War, Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory became very heavily involved in work on missile technology.

It played a major role in the production of the first tactical nuclear weapons; and in consequence, moves sharply away from basic investigations towards engineering developments.

Working with Wernher von Braun’s; rocket team at the army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers developed the upper stages and payload for the first United States satellite, Explorer I, launched on January 31, 1958.

In the 1960s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to conceive and excite robotic spacecraft to explore other worlds. Ranger and Surveyor or missions were launched to the moon, and Mariner missions visited Mercury, Venus and Mars.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory has since achieved stunning successes with an armada of mission such as Voyager, Galileo, Magellan, Deep Space I, and Mars Pathfinder.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Discovery of protein and amino acid

The early history of protein metabolism and nutrition is closely tied to the discovery of nitrogen and its distribution in nature.

Daniel Rutherford, in Edinburgh, can be regarded as the discoverer of nitrogen, which he called ‘phlogisticated air’ in his doctoral dissertation of Doctorate of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Medicine thesis in 1772.

Rutherford showed that the gas was incapable of supporting life or flame, work later extended by the French chemist Lavoisier.

In 1789, The French chemist Antoine Fourcroy recognized three distinct varieties of protein from animal sources: albumin, fibrin, and gelatin.

In 1806 Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, a French chemist, isolated asparagines, a compound in asparagus a that turned out to be the first amino acid occurring in protein to be discovered. While the second amino acid cystine was discovered by William Hyde Wallaston in 1810. The discovery of all amino acids ending with discovery of threonine in 1935.

The association between protein quality and amino acid composition was first shown by Willcock and Hopkins in 1906 when they postulated the essentiality of tryptophan.

The term protein was invented by the Swedish chemistry Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848). The name is derived from the Greek word πρωτεῖος which mean ‘standing in front’, ‘in the lead’.

Berzelius justified the name in a letter to Gerrit Mulder, Dutch physician and chemist, dated 10 July 1838. 

Protein purification began in the first half of the nineteenth century upon the discovery of the first proteins: albumin, hemoglobin, casein, pepsin, fibrin and crystalline.
Discovery of protein and amino acid

History of CERN

History of CERN
The initiative of setting up research organization for studying the nucleus of the atom was made by the French physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Louis de Broglie, in 1949. In 1952, the European governments provisionally established “Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire” (CERN) to be located at a site near Geneva. Its convention was ratified in 1954, and CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and its first accelerator, a 600 MeV proton Synchrocyclotron, began operation in 1957. One of the first experiment achievements was the long awaited observation of the decay of a pion into an electron and a neutrino.

In 1960s, CERN was leading in neutrino physics benefiting greatly from fast ejection of protons from the synchrotron. The 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron commissioned in 1959 acted as the central hub and it provided an unparalleled variety of particle beams and research possibilities. CERN commissioned the Isotope Separator On-Line (ISOLDE) in 1967 for the study of very short lived nuclei. It began construction of the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) to develop the world’s first proton collider, which was commissioned in 1971. The most significant work started back in 1968 with the invention of multiwire proportional chambers and drift chambers that revolutionized the electronic particle detectors. Georges Charpak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992 for this work.

CERN began to gather its momentum with the construction of a seven kilometer Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) in the early 1970s, initially planned for energy 300 GeV. The interconnected, large facilities gave an edge to the particle physics experiments, the construction of the SPS expanded the activities of CERN in the French side, thus residing now at the border of the two countries.

In 1984, Carlo Rubbia and Simon van de Meer received the Noble Prize for Physics for their work, which culminated in the discovery of the W-boson and Z boson at CERN in 1983 – the long sought carriers of the weak nuclear force – confirmed the “electroweak” theory unifying weak and electromagnetic forces.

In 1981, the construction of the 27 kilometers long Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) ring started. It was the largest scientific instrument constructed at the time, for initial operating energy of 50 GeV per beam.
History of CERN

History of Genetic Engineering

History of Genetic Engineering
The origins of biotechnology culminated with the birth of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering based on genetics, a science started from the early 1900’s based on experiments by the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel.

In 1944, DNA is identified as the carrier of genetic information by Oswald Avery Colin McLeod and Maclyn McCarty.

Later two important key events happened. One was the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, by Watson and Crick, and the other was the 1973 discovery by Cohen and Boyer of a recombinant DNA technique by which a section of DNA was cut from the plasmid of an E. coli bacterium and transferred into the DNA of another.

During the late 1970’s, researchers used recombinant DNA to engineer bacteria to produce small quantities of insulin and interferon.

One of the key scientific figures that attempted to highlight the promising aspects of genetic engineering was Joshua Lederberg, a Stanford professor and Nobel laureate.

In 1980, green genetic engineering was born. Genetic material is introduced into cell cultures for the first time ever with the aid of Agrobacterium tumefaciens.

In 1982, The U.S Food and Drug Administration approve the first genetically engineered drug, Genentech’s Humulin, a form of human insulin produced by bacteria.

In 1987, the first field tests of genetically engineered crops (tobacco and tomato) are conducted in the United States. Committee of the national Academy of Sciences concluded that transferring genes between species of organisms posed no serious environmental hazards.

In year 2000, International Biosafety Protocol is approved by 130 countries at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, Canada. The protocol agrees upon labeling of genetically engineered crops.
History of Genetic Engineering

History of Ions

History of Ions
The person who gives a theory of ions is Michael Faraday. It’s around 1830. He describe the portions of molecules that move from anode to cathode or vice versa.

However, there were no fully explanation until 1884 where the scientist name Svante August Arrhenius describe it in his doctoral thesis.

Michael Faraday did his experimenting with electromagnetism in 1821 by demonstrating the conversion of electrical energy into motive force.

Using his special “induction ring” He discovered “electromagnetic induction” or generation of electricity. This is the first electricity transformer.

In 1837, he showed that electrostatic force consists of a field of curved line of force, and conceived a specific inductive capacity. Then he started to develop the theory of light and gravity.
History of Ions

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the creation of functional materials, devices and systems through control of matter on the nanometer length scale (1-100 nanometers), and exploitation of novel phenomena and properties (physical, chemical, biological, mechanical, electrical...) at that length scale.

For comparison, 10 nanometers is 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. A scientific and technical revolution has just begun based upon the ability to systematically organize and manipulate matter at nanoscale. Payoff is anticipated within the next 10-15 years.

Contributions in the fields of Physics, Biology, and Chemistry have all brought together the information necessary to conceptualize and pursue Nanotechnology. However, it was Richard P. Feynman, later Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, who gave a dinner talk in 1959 for the American Physical Society that seems to have started it all, or at least made the idea tangible.

His speech was entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and postulated the idea you could write the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin. This would require text to be text be 1/25000th of its current size. He also talked about somehow manipulating individual atoms, about miniaturizing the computer, and developing better techniques and machinery for viewing these tiniest of details.
He then ended his speech with the announcement of two prizes as incentives for others to go try out what they could accomplish in this realm. One $1000 prize was for an electric motor that could only be 1/64th of an inch cubed. The other was for the first person who could shrink replicate a page of a book at 1/25000th scale so that it could be read by an electron microscope. Both prizes were claimed, in 1960 and 1985, respectively.

It was Eric Drexler who is most accredited with pushing the nanotechnology revolution to where it is today by raising public awareness, educating future researchers, and generally expounding upon the field. He was awarded the first PhD in nanotechnology ever.

Drexler also presented the idea of nanotechnology before a congressional committee in 1992 (Regis, 3).

Drexler has written three books, Molecular Engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation (1981), Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986), and Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution (1991
Nanotechnology

Protons

Protons
Protons are positively charged atoms that reside in the nucleus of an atom. These protons add the overall positive charge of a molecule. The mass of the proton is about 1,840 times the mass of the electron.

Through scientific discovery, protons have been accepted as the atom that contributes to the positive charge of an atom.

The discovery of protons can be attributed to Rutherford. Given the recent discoveries of electrons in 1897 by Thomson, Rutherford and other scientists decided that a positively charged atom must exist to center the electron to create equally neutral atoms.

Therefore, Rutherford conducted an experiment that concluded the existence of protons. Rutherford first started by changing an atom into another element by striking it with energetic alpha rays (helium nuclei). Rutherford tested this concept many times, changing one atom into another element.

A connection between the helium nuclei was made, in that something within the nuclei had to have a positive charge. Rutherford then extracted the mathematical representation from the helium nuclei for a proton. A helium nucleus is literally a proton.
Protons