A tale of the city OR time-travelling in the history of Pathology in London

2012 is the National Pathology Year and the Royal College of Pathologists is suggesting a tour of places in London that are of major importance in the history of Pathology. The tour includes the Fleming and the Hunterian Museums, the Royal College of Pathology (duh!), passing by the plaque of Prof Cedric Keith Simpson, famous for "carrying out more post mortem examinations than anyone else in the world" and entering the National Portrait Gallery to admire the portraits of Sir Edward Abraham, Dame Barbara Evelyn Clayton, Sir Joseph Lister and many more.

Inspired by this tour, I embarked on a slightly altered pathology-in-the-capital expedition.

I started from the Old Operating Theater Museum in London Bridge. The entire museum is at the roof of St Thomas church, built in 1703, which was then part of St Thomas' hospital. At that time, the rich people would get treated at home and only the poor people would seek medical treatment at the hospitals. The surgeons of early 19th century would perform amputations, removal of bladder stones or small operations in the human skulls (tephinations). However, anesthetics and antiseptic conditions were introduced quite later, in 1846 and 1865 respectively, so I can only imagine how a surgery would be before that.

Picture of how an operation used to be before anesthetics, amputation saws and bandages.

The operating theater in the museum is the oldest surviving in Europe, built in 1822.

The operating theater. Picture taken from the museum's website.

Apart from the theater, you can also see a collection of surgical objects and an apothecary of the medications that were used at that time.

The museum has the coolest entrance (see picture below) and the steepest staircase I've ever seen and it's definitely worth the visit.

The next destination was quite different. The well-hidden Florence Nightingale museum is dedicated to the life of the famous nurse, or the "Lady with the Lamp" as she has been called but also tries to give a broader description of the condition of the hospitals at that time.

Bed book by Susan Stockwell. A ghostly mattress formed by pages from Nightingale''s own book, notes on nursing, her biographies as well as hospital litterature.

The museum is a very pleasant space and by involving interactive media is trying to help us understand what the life of this amazing woman involved.

We peeped through small holes.

Tried to imagine what we would do if we were Florence Nightingale (not very successfully..)

Heard the story of the Crimean War from its heroes and used very cool audio.

My tour ended at the John Snow pub.

-Wait...wait...Do you mean this Jon Snow?

-Noo..I mean this John Snow

The famous physician who traced the source of the most intense cholera outbreak in Victorian London and is considered to be one of the fathers of modern epidemiology. He analysed the geography of water supply and mortality patterns in Soho. He noticed that nearly 500 people infected by cholera were living in houses within a few blocks of a single water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick and Lexington Street). This pump drew water from the heavily contaminated urban stretch of the Thames as well as a nearby well. John Snow associated the pump with the cholera outbreak and the pump handle was removed soon after. The pump used to be at the side entrance of the John Snow pub.

I have to say that his pathology-in-the-town tour was really enjoyable as it introduced me to all these people who helped to change the history of medicine and to a time when receiving medical treatment was a luxury.

Super-mice!

Once upon a time...there was Wolverine...

He could climb...

he could run...

 and you couldn't hurt him because he would heal fast.

But now Wolverine is scared...he is scared of the Kemp’s spiny mice.

Because the Kemp’s spiny mice..


can climb...

can run...

and certainly can heal very fast.

Ashley Seifert and his collaborators at the University of Florida, USA, have shown that two species of African spiny mouse (Acomys kempi and Acomys percivali) are the only mammals known to date that are capable of skin autotomy. That means that these animals can easily shed their skin, usually as a self-defense mechanism trying to elude a predator, and their skin can re-grow later.

In their experiments, the skin of the mice would tear very easily under low tension and hair follicle would regenerate fast in the wounds. What is even more interesting is that the Acomys mice were shown to be able to heal ear holes, where the hair follicles, sebaceous glands, skin and cartilage would be completely regenerated.


If I was Wolverine I would have lost my sleep by now as a new super-hero is discovered!

Further reading: 
Ashley W. Seifert, Stephen G. Kiama, Megan G. Seifert, Jacob R. Goheen, Todd M. Palmer, Malcolm Maden. 2012. Skin shedding and tissue regeneration in African spiny mice (Acomys). Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11499

Taming steam power

This post is about a completely different subject than what we normally write. You see, neither me nor ec892894 and sc3439 know much about engineering but we attempted to write a post to honor Thomas Newcomen and his engine that contributed significantly to the industrial progress of the last 300 years. 

300 years ago the first steam engine was installed at a coalmine at Dudley Castle in Staffordshire, UK.

  

The engine could pump 45 liters of water a minute from a depth of 50 meters and, by pumping away dangerous levels of water, enabled mining at greater depths and made coal cheaper and more available. This invention kick-started the industrial revolution in Britain.

 At the late seventeenth century the standard methods to remove the water from the mines was manual pumping or horses hauling buckets on a rope. At the same time, several people were experimenting with steam power and vacuums. In the late 1670s, the French Denis Papin invented a “steam digester”, an early form of pressure cooker. Twenty years later, he built a model of the first steam piston engine. Meanwhile, English military engineer Thomas Savery invented a primitive form of steam engine for pumping water. However, it presented a lot of problems and could draw water only from 9 meters deep.

Thomas Newcomen, an English blacksmith from Dartmouth, was influenced by both inventors and, with his partner John Calley, started experimenting on building an effective steam engine for raising water from deep mines.

He devised a model of an atmospheric engine, which employed both low-pressure steam and atmospheric pressure. In his system, a boiler produced steam which drove a piston upward. A valve then sealed the piston chamber from the boiler and cold water was pumped into the piston chamber that condensed the steam, dropped the pressure and pulled the piston back down. The vertical motion of the piston moved a beam which pivoted on a central fulcrum, with the other side of the beam being attached to a chain that went down into the mine to the water pump.The beam was heavier on the main pump side with gravity pulling down that side of the beam. Once the piston was pulled down, the valve was reopened and the process repeated. It was the first practical engine to use a piston in a cylinder. A very good animation of Newman's engine can be found here.

Diagram of a Newcomen's engine. The picture was taken from www.wikipedia.com

Thomas Newcomen died on August 5, 1729, in London. However, Newcomen's engine was used to drain mines for many years. It was later modified, around 1769, by James Watt, a Scottish inventor and engineer, who created a steam condenser that increased the efficiency of the engine. Despite Watt's improvements, Common Engines (as they were called) remained in use for a considerable time. Finally, the Watt engine almost entirely replaced the Newcomen engine by 1790.

In July, several events are being organised in Devon to celebrate the 300 anniversary of the first steam engine.

A Tale of the city OR When art and physics jiggle..

...the Jiggling Atoms exhibition is created.

Jiggling Atoms was the most interesting science-related artistic exhibition that I have seen for a long time.

It is the baby of a collaboration between artists and physicists. 25 artists attended a series of lectures in Physics at Imperial College and then tried to explain and interpret some of the phenomena through their art.




The exhibition took part in the Rag factory in Bricklane. It was a little different from the usual exhibitions that involve science as there were

cocktails

and music

that made us relax and want to interact more.

The work of the artists was interesting and inspiring, made me think, introduced me to unknown physical phenomena and terms and made me want to learn more.

I went back home satisfied that night. And a little tipsy I might say.

Flying frogs, flirtitious ostriches and dogs-to-human translation devices

Inspired by the recent IgNobel award ceremony, I prepared a list of the 17 most interesting prizes given since 1991, when this institution was initiated.

According to the organisers: "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

The Ig Nobels are a tribute to scientists who have dedicated their time in answering "smaller" scientific questions or are highlighting absurd discoveries that natural world throws up to them. The 10 prizes, the categories differ from year to year, are not only given to scientists but they are also a type of criticism of what is happening around us. The Ig Nobels are not funny, it is the combination of the work of the winners with the type of the prize that they are awarded and the justification given that can make one laugh.

So, here is my list (in a random order):

Management prize, 2010: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

Linguistics prize, 2007: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Physics, 2003: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."

Biology, 2003: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.

Biology, 2002: N. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain."

Economics, 2001: Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.

Technology, 2001: Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

Psychology, 2000: David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

Physics, 2000: Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands, and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University, UK, for using magnets to levitate a frog.

Andre Geim won also a Nobel Prize in Physics, in 2010, for his work on graphene. On his Nobel Prize lecture he said about the frog experiment: "...With this idea in mind and, allegedly, on a Friday night, I poured water inside the lab’s electromagnet when it was at its maximum power. Pouring water in one's equipment is certainly not a standard scientific approach, and I cannot recall why I behaved so ‘unprofessionally’. Apparently, no one had tried such a silly thing before, although similar facilities existed in several places around the world for decades. To my surprise, water did not end up on the floor but got stuck in the vertical bore of the magnet...As a result, we saw balls of levitating water. This was awesome. It took little time to realise that the physics behind was good old diamagnetism..Out of the many objects that we had floating inside the magnet, it was the image of a levitating frog  that started the media hype".

Flying frog

Chemistry, 2000: Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California, for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Statistics, 1998: Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."

Nutrition, 1995: John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for Luak Coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia. 

Medicine, 1994: This prize was awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes. Second, to Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation."

Psychology, 1993: John Mack of Harvard Medical School and David Jacobs of Temple University, mental visionaries, for their leaping conclusion that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space, probably were — and especially for their conclusion "the focus of the abduction is the production of children.

Visionary Technology, 1993: Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so.

Economics, 1992: The investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.

Literature, 1992: Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author from the Institute of Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he published between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days. 

So, cheers to the winners and to all the scientists that are not afraid to use their imagination and make absurd discoveries!!

The winners of the Peace IgNobel Prizes deserve to be mentioned separately. I am posting them exactly as they were described by the IgNobel committee.

2011: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

REFERENCE: VIDEO and OFFICIAL CITY INFO

2009: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

2008. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

2005: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."

2004: Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

2003: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.

Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India.

2002: Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device. 

2000: Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, "A Security System for a Vehicle") 

1999: The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"

1994: John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.

1993: The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Phillipines, suppliers of sugary hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation's history.

1992 : Daryl Gates, former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together in the LA riots.

 

In my free time i read. DNA books.

*The scheme of DNA storage was taken from Supplementary Materials for "Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA" by George M. Church, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri published in Science.


For further reading...
 Church GM, Gao Y, Kosuri S. Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA. Science, 2012 Aug 16.

A tale of the city OR In the era of i..

There was iGem (international Genetically Engineered Machine).

The UCL iGEM 2012 team proposes a synthetic biology approach for the degradation of micro-plastic pollutants (plastic waste that is gradually broken down by solar energy and the mechanical action of the sea) within the marine environment, with emphasis on regions of excessive debris accumulation, such as the North Pacific ‘garbage patch’.

Apart from their research they tried to engage the public into synthetic biology. Their first idea was to run a lab in an art gallery so that everyone could come and see them. But it was quite complicated so they decided to run workshops where the public could participate. Yesterday they teamed up with a group of "biohackers" to create the world's first "Public BioBrick" at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London. The biohackers is a group of biology enthusiasts that run their own biological experiments. C-lab also participated in the event.

The event took place in the UCL Museum of Zoology, which I hadn't visited before although I have been around this area for four years. It's an impressive building and the museum is definitely worth-visiting.

The night was fun.
 There was music..

a molecular cocktail bar..

we ran experiments..

and read comics about synthetic biology and about the iGEM project.

The students were very enthusiastic, ready to talk to everyone, explain their project and get everyone involved. So were the biohackers.

And who knows, maybe one day we will use synthetic micro-organisms to degrade the plastic waste concentrated in the marine environment. And maybe this day won't be very far away..

To be (a doctor) or not to be? That is the dilemma.

During the summer, the National Theatre chose to stage the "Doctor's Dilemma" by Bernard Shaw. Set in London of the early 20th century, the play is a critic on the dangers of privatised medical practice, at a time when NHS wasn't yet founded.

The main character of the play is a newly honoured doctor, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, who has developed a revolutionary new cure for tuberculosis by inoculating the pathogen to the patients. Serendipitously, the first successful attempt in immunization against tuberculosis took place in 1906 by Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin, the same year as the play was first staged. However, Bernard Shaw's inspiration of his hero was the bacteriologist Sir Almorth Wright who developed an anti-typhoid vaccine in 1892. 

Bernard Shaw has been very critical of his contemporary health system (or the lack of one) and of doctors, in general. He questioned whether doctors are men of science; "It does happen exceptionally that a practicing doctor makes a contribution to science; but it happens much oftener that he draws disastrous conclusions from his clinical experience because he has no conception of scientific method, and believes, like any rustic, that the handling of evidence and statistics needs no expertness". He was skeptical about statistical illusions; "here may be a doctor here and there who in dealing with the statistics of disease has taken at least the first step towards sanity by grasping the fact that as an attack of even the commonest disease is an exceptional event, apparently overwhelming statistical evidence in favour of any prophylactic can be produced by persuading the public that everybody caught the disease formerly". He underlined the surprises of attention and neglect, the power of "fashion" on the chosen therapies and he suggests a more equal and fair system.

However, he managed in his play to expose the lethal absurdity of the medical service without treating the doctors as caricatures. 

The satire is sharp and lines like: 

"I've tried these modern inoculations myself. I've killed people with them; and I've cured people with them; but I gave them up because I never could tell which I was going to do",

"I have forgotten all my science:what's the use of my pretending I haven't? But I have great experience: clinical experience; and bedside experience is the main thing, isn't it?"

 or  "I know your surgeons and their like. They've found out that a man's body's full of bits and scraps of old organs he has no mortal use for. Thanks to chloroform, you can cut half a dozen of them out without leaving him any the worse, except for the illness and the guineas it costs him"

manage to set the scene about how doctors were seen at the beginning of the last century with a very elaborate sense of humor.

Bernard Shaw by Einar Nerman, a swedish artist who moved to London in 1921 and chronicled its social and artistic life for 19 years.

The Doctor's Dilemma is a very interesting and a witty depiction of the medical science of the early 20th century that inspired William Beveridge to lay the foundation for the National Health Service, although I must admit that I got bored of the romantic part of the play.

Sci-Art

In 1952 a young Research Assistant in King's College London took an X-ray picture of DNA molecules. This picture, called "Photo 51", was one of the basic experimental evidence on which Watson and Crick based the theory of the structure of the DNA and this Research Assistant was Rosalind Franklin*.

"Photo 51" of the DNA molecule taken by Rosalind Franklin

Apart from the structure of DNA, Franklin had a major contribution on the study of the structures of RNA, tobacco mosaic and polio viruses. She died from ovarian cancer at the age of 37, in 1958.

However, her work still inspires people and not only scientists.

At a random search on the internet I came across some really interesting pieces of art by Wyllie O Hagan. The artists were inspired by "Photo 51" and, breathing life into it, they transformed it into vibrant and stimulating artworks that have been exhibited at the Smith Killian Gallery in Charleston, SC, USA in 2007.

The titles from top left are: A Vision of Rosalind 1,  A Vision of Rosalind 2,

 A Vision of Rosalind 3 and A Vision of Rosalind for OCNA

Science seems to be a recurrent theme of their work as they have also done another exhibition titled "Transformation in Science and Art", created during an Arts Residency with the Cancer Research UK group in the Department of Oncology at University College London.
Here are some more pieces of their science-related work that have impressed me.

Moreover, a monumental 40 meter digital print of their work hangs in The Royal Mint Building in London.

My absolute favorite is the "Vision of Rosalind for OCNA". I just find it captivating. I am always amazed when people are able to look at science through a different prism and appreciate its beauty.


* Rosalind Franklin took the picture with  Raymond Gosling- a PhD student assigned to help her

** All the pictures were taken from Wyllie O Hagan's official site and copies for most of the paintings can be bought here.

A tale of the city OR The Big Bang Fair

Yesterday, i was here:

Big Bang Fair is a competition, more like a celebration as the organisers describe it, in STEM subjects. Pupils from 11 till 18 years old can take part in the regional Big Bang Fairs either as individuals or in groups and the best projects are selected to go through to the National Big Bang Fair.







It was great fun.
We made stools from newspapers:

Played with colorful solutions:

And with cards:

But also some serious science took place. There were hydrolic robots, screw drivers, projects on the life on Mars and the power of circular movement.

 And there were winners...

But what i loved yesterday was the enthusiasm in the eyes of the students when they were talking about Science and their projects. 

Yesterday i went to the Royal College of Arts Graduate Exhibition.

Every summer, the graduates from all the departments of the RCA show their degree projects to family and friends, art-world insiders and even potential buyers. The exhibition takes places across the College’s two campuses in Battersea and Kensington.

I went to the Kensington campus where the exhibition is massive covering all eight departments of the College. I was really impressed by the imagination and the creativity of all the students but i spent most of my time at the Innovation Design Engineering section.

Several projects tried to address sustainability issues, some attempted to develop new communication platforms while others tried to develop new materials. Most of them involved cutting-edge technology and all the projects were really really interesting.

Some of them made a particular impression on me:

David Stevens designed a new cast that could help the patients with fractures to heal faster and with less pain.

Ho-Tzu Cheng constructed a fume extractor aiming to protect more efficiently the health of the person that is cooking.

To be honest, i was completely ignoring the fact that cooking fumes are considered as a prevailing factor for lung cancer in non-smokers. Apparently there are several epidemiological studies mostly focused on Asian populations like this but also in the USA.

Another project that i found very interesting was the platform Genobi designed by Joel Trotter. This platform will help people understand their genetic background and make the necessary lifestyle adjustments to optimise their health.

Luc Fusaro constructed the SmartTouch, a smart and easy to use monitor for the glucose level in our organisms. Diabetics only need to have a smartphone where they adjust this small device. This project made me think of Peter Diamandis's TED lecture.

All in all, it was a very interesting evening and i can't wait to see all these projects being used in our everyday life!!

Selective Erasure of a Fear Memory: Science fiction or reality??

Further reading

JS Haan et al, Selective Erasure of a Fear Memory, Science, 13 March 2009:
Vol. 323 no. 5920 pp. 1492-1496