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546 [843] KAMERLINGH ONNES EHRLICH
researches of his countryman Van der Waals [726]. It seemed to Kamerlingh Onnes that to study the behavior of gases it was necessary to measure vol ume, pressure, and temperature very ac curately, and that important information could be obtained at very low tempera tures. To reach low temperatures, one had to use liquefied gases, and Kamer lingh Onnes’ interest shifted to the prob lem of liquefying gas, in particular, he lium, the one gas still defying all efforts at liquefaction in the first decade of the twentieth century. Kamerlingh Onnes built an elaborate device that would cool helium intensively by means of evaporating liquid hydro gen, after which the Joule-Thomson effect as used by Dewar [759] could be brought into play. The result was that in 1908 liquid helium was produced for the first time and collected in a flask con tained in a larger flask of liquid hydro gen, which was in turn contained in a still larger flask of liquid air. It turned out that the liquid helium was at a tem perature only 4 degrees above absolute zero. In 1910 he found that by allowing some of it to evaporate, the remainder (still liquid) could be cooled to 0.8 de grees above absolute zero. To the end of his life Kamerlingh Onnes did not suc ceed in producing solid helium, but a few months after his death, one of his co-workers, Keesom [1042], managed the trick by using not only low tempera tures but also high pressures. There was more to liquid helium than the mere establishment of a new record of cold, or of the final liquefaction of the last gas. Kamerlingh Onnes studied the properties of materials at liquid he lium temperatures and in 1911 made the startling discovery that certain metals, such as lead and mercury, underwent a total loss of electrical resistance at such temperatures. In this way the phenome non of superconductivity was discovered. Kamerlingh Onnes also found that super conductivity could be wiped out, even at those temperatures at which it could exist, by imposing a large enough mag netic field upon the substance. The phenomenon of superconductivity was not all. Other odd properties were found to exist only in the close neigh borhood of absolute zero. A form of liquid helium (“helium II”) was found which had properties radically different from those of all other substances. A whole new world of the ultracold opened up. Modem computers can make use of ultra-small switches that will enable a great amount of circuitry to be crammed into a small space. Some of these switches work through superconductivity and must be cooled in liquid helium. Kamerlingh Onnes received the 1912 Rumford medal of the Royal Society and the next year did even better when he received the Nobel Prize in physics for his liquefaction of helium. [844] ROUX, Pierre Paul fimile (roo) French bacteriologist
cember 17, 1853 Died: Paris, November 3, 1933 In 1878 Roux was accepted as an as sistant at Pasteur’s [642] laboratory in Paris. He and Chamberland [816] worked with Pasteur on the attenuation of pathogens so that an inoculation could be produced that would not initi ate a serious disease but would bring about immunity. The specific success lay with anthrax. Roux went on to study diphtheria. He clearly demonstrated that the bacillus, discovered shortly before by Löffler [828], did indeed cause diphtheria and, moreover, that it was not its mere pres ence that did the trick, but a toxin which it produced. Once an understanding of the toxin and its role was reached, it was possible to produce an antitoxin that would neu tralize the pathogenic effect of the toxin, and this Behring [846] went on to do. [845] EHRLICH, Paul (air'likh) German bacteriologist Born: Strehlen, Silesia (now Strzelin, Poland), March 14, 1854 Died: Bad Homburg, Rhenish Prussia, August 20, 1915 547 [845] EHRLICH
EHRLICH [845] Ehrlich, the son of a prosperous Jew ish businessman, did poorly in school. From early youth, however, he was in terested in both chemistry and biology and, during his later schooling, at tempted to combine the two. In medical school he was abnormally (for those days) interested in chemistry and like Flemming [762] and Koch [767] began to try to apply the new aniline dyes to the problem of staining. Fortunately his teacher, Waldeyer [722], encouraged the young man and in the end Ehrlich dis covered several practical bacterial stains and wrote his graduation thesis on the subject. He also learned to stain white blood corpuscles and discovered a new variety called mast cells through their staining characteristics. After obtaining his medical degree at Leipzig in 1878, Ehrlich discovered a good method of staining the tubercle bacillus and this brought him to the at tention of Koch, whose specialty was tu berculosis. In 1882 Ehrlich began work with Koch, but unfortunately he caught a light case of the disease in 1886 and retired to Egypt, where he hoped the dry climate might cure him. It did. When Ehrlich returned from Egypt in 1889, he joined forces with Behring [846] and Kitasato [870], two other men who had worked with Koch, and in 1890 received a professorial appointment at the University of Berlin. They were at tempting to find a cure for diphtheria. It was Behring’s idea (similar to Richet’s [809] but independent of him) to make use of antibodies produced by animals that had been inoculated with the diph theria germ, which had itself been dis covered a few years earlier by Löffler [828], Ehrlich, who was a most gifted and intuitive experimenter, worked out the details of technique and dosage and by 1892 a diphtheria antitoxin was pro duced that worked wonders against that dreaded childhood disease. The achieve ment won Ehrlich a professorship at the University of Berlin (and won Behring a Nobel Prize). Ehrlich quarreled with Behring and they parted in anger. But Ehrlich would quarrel at the drop of a hat. Throughout his life he had his own notions about the exact course that research should take and anyone who worked for or with him received detailed instructions as to what to do. Any deviation from these instruc tions was cause enough for a quarrel. The fact that Ehrlich was almost invari ably right did not make his dictatorship easier to take. In 1896 the German government, impressed by the diphtheria toxin, opened an institute for serum research and Ehrlich was put in charge. He con tinued to work on serum therapy and evolved a theory, interesting in its time, but now outmoded, of how antibodies function. However, he kept returning to his stains, which, thanks to the work of men such as Golgi [764] and Gram [841], were becoming more important in micro scopic work. Ehrlich reasoned that the value of a stain was that it colored some cells and not others; it colored bacteria, for instance, and made them stand out against a colorless background. Well, a stain could not color bacteria unless it combined with some substance in the bacterium and if it did that it would usu ally kill the bacterium. If a dye could be found that stained bacteria and not ordi nary cells, it might represent a chemical that killed bacteria without harming human beings. Ehrlich would have, in effect, a “magic bullet” that could be taken into the body where it would seek out the parasites and destroy them. And, indeed, Ehrlich did discover a dye, called trypan red, that helped de stroy the trypanosomes that caused such diseases as sleeping sickness. Ehrlich kept looking for something better. He decided that the action of trypan red was caused by the nitrogen atom combinations it contained. Arsenic atoms resemble nitrogen atoms in chemi cal properties and, in general, introduce a more poisonous quality into com pounds. He began to try all the arsenic- containing organic compounds he could find or synthesize, one after the other. He set his students and associates to work on them, and literally hundreds of chemicals were tried. By 1907 he had reached dihydroxydiamino-arsenoben- zene hydrochloride, which was number
[845] EHRLICH
BEHRING [846] 606. It did not work very well against trypanosomes and he left it behind and went on.
In 1908 Ehrlich was awarded a share, along with Mechnikov [775], of the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for his work on immunity and serum therapy generally. As was to happen in more than one case, however, his most dramatic achievement came after the Nobel Prize. In 1909 a new assistant of Ehrlich, practicing the techniques involved in testing arsenicals for trypanosome-killing properties, picked up chemical 606 again. (By now Ehrlich had reached the 900s.) It was still no good for trypano somes but it turned out to be a remark ably efficient killer for spirochetes, the microorganism that causes syphilis. Syphilis, more dreaded than trypano somiasis, was almost a secret disease, es pecially in those days. Ehrlich therefore pounced upon his assistant’s finding at once, confirmed the observation, and in 1910 announced it to the world. He named the chemical salvarsan (although its proper short chemical name is now arsphenamine). For the rest of his life he worked strenously to see to it that the medical profession used the chemical correctly and had 65,000 units distrib uted to physicians all over the globe without charge, feeling the cure to be more important than income. Sometimes doctors did not follow in structions carefully, and incorrect usage led to tragedies that brought on vicious attacks on Ehrlich as a quack and mur derer. Ehrlich won through, however (though he was forced to sue the most slanderous ones), and shone the more brightly and permanently as a healer and benefactor of mankind. Trypan red and salvarsan marked the beginning of modem chemotherapy (a word coined by Ehrlich). Chemicals had been used against disease before Ehrlich and, indeed, since the dawn of history. These, like quinine against malaria, or foxglove against heart disease, were, however, folk remedies, stumbled upon by accident. Ehrlich’s chemical cures were deliberately sought after with all the techniques of science. It was thought, after Ehrlich, that a chemical cure for each infectious disease would now quickly be found, but in this mankind was disappointed. Another quarter century had to pass before Domagk [1183] was to make the next step and throw chemotherapy into high gear.
Ehrlich was buried in the Jewish cem etery in Frankfort. A generation later, the tomb was desecrated by the Nazis, but it was restored after World War II. [846] BEHRING, Emil Adolf von (bay'ring) German bacteriologist
sia (now Dawa, Poland), March 3, 1854
March 31, 1917 Behring, the son of a schoolmaster, was slated to be a minister, but one of his teachers recognized his talent and ar ranged for a free medical education on the promise he would serve in the army. He obtained his M.D. in 1880 and duly became an army surgeon. In 1889 he went to work with Koch [767] at the lat ter’s Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin.
There he discovered, in 1890, that it was possible to produce an immunity against tetanus (or lockjaw) in an ani mal by injecting into it graded doses of blood serum from another animal suffer ing from tetanus. A fraction of the serum from the immunized animal (which he called the antitoxin) could then be used to confer at least temporary immunity on still another animal. (Ri chet [809] was trying similar techniques against tuberculosis, but failed where Behring succeeded.) Behring wondered if this could not be done for diphtheria, a disease that was in those days almost sure death to the chil dren it attacked. The diptheria antitoxin, successfully marketed by 1892, not only conferred immunity, but also helped de feat the disease after it had begun. Al though Ehrlich [845] probably did most of the actual work involved in the devel 549 [847] POINCARÉ
RUBNER [848] opment, the idea was Behring’s and he was given the credit for it. In 1884 it gained him a professorship at the Uni versity of Halle and in 1901 it earned for him the first Nobel Prize awarded in medicine and physiology. However, it may be significant that after Behring and Ehrlich parted in anger, Behring achieved nothing of con sequence, while Ehrlich went on to addi tional triumphs. [847] POINCARE, Jules Henri (pwahn- kah-rayO
French mathematician Born: Nancy, April 29, 1854 Died: Paris, July 17, 1912 Poincare has been called by some the last of the universal mathematicians be cause he managed to do first-class cre ative work in most branches of mathe matics, as well as in astronomy (writing well enough to be considered a literary figure), and because the twentieth-cen tury ramification of mathematics makes it seem unlikely that one man will ever be able to do so again. His start, however, was inauspicious, for his motor coordination and his eye sight were poor and in some ways he seemed actually retarded. His photo graphic memory helped him do well at school. As a teenager, he lived through the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War, as did his first cousin, Raymond Poincare. The latter gained an enduring anti-Ger man hatred that had ample opportunity to express itself when Raymond served as President of France during World War I. Henri Poincare, on the other hand, grew interested in mathematics as a teenager, died before World War I, and, in any case, found mathematics to be above nationalism. Poincare obtained his doctor’s degree in 1879, one of his teachers being Her- mite [641], and served at the University of Paris thereafter. He worked on celes tial mechanics and his contributions to the three-body problem earned him, in 1889, a prize awarded by King Oscar II of Sweden. His theoretical work on tides and on rotating fluid spheres amplified and buttressed the work of G. H. Dar win [777] on the tidal hypothesis of the creation of the moon. He was one of the first to see the significance of the young Einstein’s [1064] theory of relativity and in later life wrote profoundly on mathematical creativity. This he considered a matter of fundamental importance (and it would be impossible to disagree with that if we assume, as may well be true, that all creativity of whatever sort is related). [848] RUBNER, Max German physiologist Born: Munich, Bavaria, June 2, 1854
Died: Berlin, April 27, 1932 Rubner, the son of a locksmith, stud ied medicine at the University of Mu nich, obtaining his medical degree in 1878. He carried on the work of his teacher, Voit [691], adding to it the painstaking quantitativeness that was coming into fashion in late nineteenth- century Germany. In testing the energy production by humans in large calorim eters, he missed no tricks. He mea sured the nitrogen content of urine and feces, and carefully estimated the quan tity of the various types of foodstuffs in the diet he fed his subjects. He concluded in 1884 that no one par ticular type of foodstuff produced en ergy. The body made use of carbohy drates, fats, and proteins with equal readiness. The nitrogen portion of pro teins was split away before it was used for fuel, he maintained, and in this he was proved correct. In 1891 he succeeded to the chair of hygiene at the University of Berlin, which had been held by Koch [767]; and by 1894 he had discovered that the en ergy produced from foodstuffs by the body was precisely the same in quantity as it would have been if those same foodstuffs had been consumed in a fire (once the energy content of urea was subtracted). The laws of thermo dynamics, in other words, held for living tissue as well as for the inanimate world,
[849] CARROLL
PARSONS [850] and organisms had no magic ways of ex tracting energy. Thus was finally confirmed the conjec ture advanced by Mayer [587] a half century earlier. This was a serious blow against vitalism (the view that there was one set of laws of nature for living tissue and another for inanimate bodies). Still another blow was to be provided by Buchner [903] three years later. [849] CARROLL, James English-American physician
London), England, June 5, 1854 Died: Washington, D.C., Sep tember 16, 1907 Carroll intended to be a naval engi neer, but he left England for Canada in 1869 and then in 1874 enlisted in the U. S. Army. He remained in the army for the rest of his life, became a hospital steward in 1883, attended medical school and gained his M.D. from the University of Maryland in 1891. During the Spanish-American War, he served as act ing assistant surgeon. Carroll was with Reed [822] in the in vestigation of yellow fever in Cuba. On August 27, 1900, Carroll decided to test the theory that mosquitoes were carriers of yellow fever, something he rather doubted. He allowed a mosquito that had been biting fever victims to bite him and within a few days he had a severe case of yellow fever. He recovered, fortunately, something his fellow investigator, Lazear [955] did not do, but the good fortune was limited. The disease left as a legacy a damaged heart which killed Carroll seven years later. [850] PARSONS, Sir Charles Algernon British engineer Born: London, England, June 13, 1854
Died: on shipboard off Kingston, Jamaica, February 11, 1931 Parsons was the fourth son of the 3d earl of Rosse [513], but he made his mark in a field far removed from his fa ther’s astronomy. After studying at the University of Dublin and at Cambridge, he devoted himself to engineering. In particular, he was interested in im proving the utilization of steam power. The steam engine, as designed by Watt [316] a century before, used the energy of steam to set a piston moving back and forth and this reciprocal motion was converted, by appropriate coupling, into the rotational movement of a wheel. It had naturally occurred to men ever since Watt’s day that if one could direct a current of stream against the blades set about the rim of a wheel, a rotational movement could be set up directly, pro ducing a far greater velocity of rotation. In the 1880s such high speeds of rotation were highly desirable, since they would be most useful in electric generators of the type Faraday [474] first constructed a half century earlier. In other words the development of a steam turbine would not only produce mechanical energy but also electrical energy. The problem had its engineering difficulties, for the wheel had to be de signed to withstand the mechanical stress of rapid rotation; the metal of which it was constructed had to withstand the heat; and the steam itself could not be allowed to escape prematurely. Parsons solved each of these problems and in 1884 succeeded in producing the first practical steam turbine. Successive im provements in design increased its efficiency and he went into business. In 1894 he was experimenting with ships driven by such engines and in 1897 he was ready for a dramatic show. It was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The British navy was holding a stately review when suddenly past the ships skinned Parson’s turbine-powered ship,
speed for any ship. It moved, moreover, with scarcely any vibration or noise. A naval vessel was sent after it, but couldn’t get near it. At once the steam turbine was bid for and in 1885 a Chilean battleship was the first to be turbine-equipped. Soon tur bines were powering both warships and merchant vessels. Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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