Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
07 January 2011
Science Timeline Part Eleven
From life saving advancements in medicine to
life destroying developments in nuclear science
Medicine was also benefiting from the ability to examine smaller and smaller structures. In 1888, the function of chromosomes was beginning to be understood. In 1902, hormones were identified, and four years later, the importance of vitamins was recognized.
Canadians Discover Diabetes Treatment
A huge advance was made in Canada in 1921.
Frederick Banting (on right in picture) was a doctor working in London, Ontario.
One evening in October 1920 he was browsing through a medical journal when an idea
for research occurred to him. The University of Toronto gave Dr. Banting support
in isolating the long-
Banting (on right) and Best (on left) isolated the secretion by extracting it from
the pancreatic tissue of dogs. They called it insulin and once injected into diabetics
it proved spectacularly effective as a life-
Insulin is not a cure, it’s a treatment.
Discovery Made by Accident
In 1928, the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered the miraculous properties of penicillin, which would lead to cures for many deadly diseases.
In September 1928, Fleming was preparing for a short holiday. Just before leaving he decided to cultivate some staphylococci bacteria that he would study when he got back.
Fleming opened a Petri dish for a few seconds to put the bacteria inside. Two floors below his laboratory, another scientist was studying the mould penicillium notatum.
Millions of very light mould spores floated in the air, up the staircase and the elevator shaft, through the open doors of Fleming’s laboratory, and into the open dish where, luckily, he was just putting the staphylococci.
Fleming, preoccupied with his vacation, left the Petri dish on the laboratory bench. While Fleming was away the temperature turned out to be perfect for penicillium, but not so good for the staphylococci, which grew slowly. The penicillium mould thrived and secreted penicillin, which oozed around the dish, preventing the growth of staphylococci and leaving the penicillium mould isolated from small bacterial colonies in the dish.
Fleming, upon his return, immediately realized that the mould had killed the bacteria. He conducted other tests to learn what other bacteria this mould could kill. He also tried to make pure penicillin, but failed.
Penicillin was almost forgotten until scientists at Oxford University returned to
the problem in 1939. This time they were able to mass-
Soon penicillin and other antibiotics were being used to cure pneumonia, tuberculosis,
scarlet fever, tetanus, syphilis, meningitis, and many other diseases.
In 1935, sulfa drugs were developed to combat infections of various kinds.
Skullduggery in the Lab
James Watson and Francis Crick became world famous for discovering the structure of DNA. But, Rosalind Franklin is rarely mentioned.
She was a brilliant physical chemist doing research at the University of London, England. Using a technique she invented, Franklin photographed the DNA molecule and the results clearly showed DNA’s helical structure. At the time (1951), no one else had been able to produce such photographs. In addition, Franklin identified the location of phosphate sugars in DNA.
Ms. Franklin did not get on well with one of her colleagues, Maurice Wilkins. He passed Rosalind Franklin’s photograph on to the British biochemist Francis Crick without her knowledge or permission. A few months later, when the science journal Nature published Watson and Crick’s paper on the structure of DNA, Franklin was apparently unaware that they had used her research.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. But by then, Rosalind Franklin had died and her great contribution went mostly unrecognized.
According to the terms of the Nobel Prizes, they can only be awarded to the living.
Canadian Connection to DNA Research
Canada can claim another medical pioneer. Oswald Avery was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1877. In 1944, he published a paper outlining research showing that the agent responsible for transferring genetic information is not a protein, as biochemists had believed, but the nucleic acid deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
Then, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the structure of DNA. They
described two strands of sugar and phosphate twisted into a double helix and joined
by what they called base pairs.
These pairs stretched across the two strands something like the rungs of a ladder. In cell division, each DNA double helix would separate into two strands, and each strand would build up its matching strand on itself. Watson and Crick had uncovered the mystery of how characteristics were inherited in all living organisms.
Building the Atomic Bomb
During World War II, some of the world’s best scientific minds were gathered together
in the desert of New Mexico. The so-
In a famous letter, Albert Einstein, the confirmed pacifist, has urged American President Franklin D. Roosevelt to apply whatever resources were needed to the project. Einstein set aside his beliefs in peace and disarmament, because of his concern that Germany might develop this terrifying weapon first.
On July 16, 1945, the United States tested the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New
Mexico. It worked, although some of the scientists who designed it were concerned
the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. Unlike all previously developed explosives,
the atomic bomb and later nuclear weapons release energy from within the core, or
nucleus, of the atom.
By now, Germany was out of the war. Two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan’s surrender.
Image Credits
Library and Archives Canada
U.S. Department of Energy
© Canada and the World, January 2011
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1924 -
Three physicists add to the field of quantum mechanics: Austrian Wolfgang Pauli develops the Pauli exclusion principle, Erwin Schrodinger, also an Austrian, works on equations, while in Germany Werner Heisenberg creates his Uncertainty Principle. Schrodinger is also famous for his thought experiment “Schrodinger’s Cat” through which he seeks to explain the highly complex theory of quantum mechanics.
1927
Belgian George Lemaître is a man of many accomplishments; in addition to being a Catholic priest he is also a professor of physics and an astronomer. He puts forward a theory he calls the “hypothesis of the primeval atom” to explain the origin of the Universe. In 1950, the British astronomer, Fred Hoyle gave this idea its more popular name, calling it the Big Bang Theory in a BBC broadcast. As a man of God, Lemaître has no difficulty reconciling science and religion; who is to say the deity did not create the Big Bang?
1930s
In explaining why ice ages come and go Serbian astrophysicist Miultin Milankovitch develops a theory that changes in the geometry of the Sun and Earth, such as variations in orbit and the axis of the planet’s angle, account for alterations in the levels of solar radiation.
1930
British aeronautical engineer Frank Whittle files his first patent for a turbojet engine. It is more than a decade before the first flight powered by the engine takes place.
1932
Transatlantic phone calls are carried by radio, cost $75 for three minutes, and are
frequently disrupted by static interference. The American physicist Karl Jansky is
working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, trying to find ways to minimize this static
background noise. Jansky identifies three sources: nearby thunderstorms, distant
thunderstorms, and a constant hiss-
1932
Improving on an earlier crude version, German engineers Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll improve their electron microscope to give a magnification of 400 times.
1932
British scientist James Chadwick discovers neutrons, the third particle that, together with electrons and protons, goes to make up an atom. This discovery slips atomic physics into a higher gear.
1935
Scientists in New York and London collaborate to invent nylon. The world’s first synthetic fibre gets its name from the initials of New York and the first three letters of London.
1935
Joining biology, chemistry, and other fields of science the British botanist Arthur Tansley is the first to use the word “ecosystem” in a scientific paper. However, Roy Clapham, a colleague of Tansley, was the person who actually coined the word in 1930.
1937
German-
1938
Having escaped Nazi Germany, Austrian physicist Lise Meitner is still collaborating with her colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin in experiments in which they bombard uranium atoms with neutrons. They create a much lighter element and Meitner and her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, recognize they have split uranium atoms. They call the process fission. Otto Hahn is awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, while Meitner is ignored.
TELEVISION
An early milestone in the development of television was the successful transmission
of an image in 1884 by German inventor Paul Nipkow. He used a mechanical system,
known as the rotating disk. This was developed by the Scottish scientist John Logie
Baird, who broadcast a televised image in 1926 to an audience at the Royal Academy
of Science in London. But this mechanical transmission system proved to be a bit
of a dead end. The proven capability of the electronic tube system that had been
developed for radio turned financial and scientific attention toward that technology
and away from research on the rotating disk. The earliest U.S. patent for an all-
Not everyone was impressed with this new bit of technology. Darryl F. Zanuck, President of the 20th Century Fox film studio was among them. He said in 1946 that, “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”