7 Important SCIENTISTS

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Ignaz Philip Semmelweis

On August 13, 1865, a man died in a psychiatric clinic in Vienna, who discovered an elementary, but incredibly effective way of dealing with maternal mortality. Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, obstetrician, professor at the University of Budapest, was the head of St. Roch's Hospital. It was divided into two buildings, and the percentage of women who died in childbirth was strikingly different. In the first department in 1840-1845, this figure was 31%, that is, almost every third woman was doomed. At the same time, the second building showed a completely different result - 2.7%.

The explanations were the most ridiculous and curious - from the evil spirit that dwelt in the first compartment, and the bell of a Catholic priest who made women nervous, to social stratification and simple coincidence. Semmelweis was a man of science, so he began to investigate the causes of postpartum fever and soon suggested that the doctors of the pathological and anatomical department, which was located in the first building, introduced the infection to women in labor. This idea was confirmed by the tragic death of a professor of forensic medicine, a good friend of Semmelweis, who accidentally injured his finger during an autopsy and soon died of sepsis. In the hospital, the doctors were urgently called from the dissecting room, and often they did not even have time to properly wash their hands.

Semmelweis decided to test his theory and ordered all staff not only to wash their hands thoroughly, but to disinfect them in a solution of bleach. Only after that, doctors were allowed to visit pregnant women and women in labor. It would seem an elementary procedure, but it was she who gave fantastic results: mortality among women and newborns in both buildings fell to a record 1.2%.

It could have been a tremendous triumph of science and thought, if not for one thing: the ideas of Semmelweis did not find any support. Colleagues and most of the medical community not only ridiculed him, but even began to persecute him. He was not allowed to publish the mortality statistics, he was practically deprived of the right to operate - he was offered to be content with only demonstrations on a dummy. Its discovery seemed absurd and eccentric, taking precious time from the doctor, and the proposed innovations allegedly disgraced the hospital.

From grief, worries, awareness of his own powerlessness and understanding that hundreds of women and children will continue to die, due to the fact that his arguments were not convincing enough, Semmelweis fell seriously ill with mental disorder. He was tricked into a psychiatric clinic, where the professor spent the last two weeks of his life. According to some testimonies, the cause of his death was the dubious treatment and the equally dubious attitude of the clinic staff.

In 20 years, the scientific community with great enthusiasm will accept the ideas of the English surgeon Joseph Lister, who decided to use carbolic acid in his operations to disinfect hands and instruments. It is Lister who will be called the founding father of surgical antiseptics, he will take the post of chairman of the Royal Society of Medicine and will peacefully die in glory and honor, unlike the rejected, ridiculed and misunderstood Semmelweis, whose example proves how difficult it is to be a pioneer in any field.

Werner Forsman

Another selfless doctor, albeit not forgotten, but for the sake of science put his own life at risk is Werner Forsmann, a German surgeon and urologist, professor at the University. Gutenberg. For several years he studied the potential for developing a method of cardiac catheterization - a method that was revolutionary for those times.

Almost all of Forsman's colleagues were convinced that any foreign object in the heart would disrupt his work, cause shock and, as a result, stop. However, Forsman decided to take a chance and try his own method, which he arrived at in 1928. He had to act alone, as the assistant refused to participate in a dangerous experiment.

Therefore, Forsman independently incised a vein at the elbow and inserted a narrow tube into it, through which he passed the probe into his right atrium. Turning on the X-ray machine, he made sure that the operation was successful - cardiac catheterization was possible, which means that tens of thousands of patients around the world had a chance of salvation.

In 1931, Forsman applied this method for angiocardiography. In 1956, Forsman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the developed methodology together with American doctors A. Kurnan and D. Richards.

Alfred Russell Wallace

In the popular interpretation of the theory of natural selection, two inaccuracies are often made. Firstly, the wording “the fittest survives” is used instead of “the fittest survives,” and secondly, this concept of evolution is traditionally called Darwin's theory, although this is not entirely true.

When Charles Darwin was working on his revolutionary Origin of Species, he received an article from the unknown Alfred Wallace, who was recovering from malaria in Malaysia at the time. Wallace turned to Darwin as a respected scientist and asked to read the text in which he outlined his views on evolutionary processes.

The striking similarity of ideas and direction of thought amazed Darwin: it turned out that two people in different parts of the world at the same time came to absolutely identical conclusions.

In a response letter, Darwin promised that he would use Wallace's materials for his future book, and on July 1, 1858, he first presented excerpts from these works at readings in the Linnaean Society. To Darwin's credit, he not only did not hide the research of Wallace, who was only known to him, but also deliberately read his article first, before his own. However, at that moment both of them had enough glory - their common ideas were very warmly received by the scientific community. It is not fully understood why the name of Darwin overshadowed Wallace so much, although their contributions to the formation of the concept of natural selection are equal. Probably, the matter is in the publication of "The Origin of Species", which followed almost immediately after the speech in the Linnaean Society, or in the fact that Wallace was carried away by other dubious phenomena - phrenology and hypnosis.

Be that as it may, today there are hundreds of Darwin monuments in the world and not so many Wallace statues.

Howard Flory and Ernst Chain

One of the most important discoveries of mankind, which completely turned the world upside down, is antibiotics. Penicillin was the first effective drug against many serious diseases. His discovery is inextricably linked with the name of Alexander Fleming, although in fairness this glory should be divided into three.

Ernst Cheyne

The story of the discovery of penicillin is familiar to everyone: in Fleming's laboratory, chaos reigned, and in one of the Petri dishes, in which there was agar (an artificial substance for growing cultures of bacteria), mold started. Fleming noticed that in the places where the mold penetrated, the colonies of bacteria became transparent - their cells were destroyed. So, in 1928, Fleming managed to isolate an active substance that has a destructive effect on bacteria - penicillin.

However, it was not yet an antibiotic. Fleming could not get it in its pure form, as it was incredibly difficult. But Howard Flory and Ernst Cheyne succeeded - in 1940, after much research, they finally developed a method for purifying penicillin.

On the eve of World War II, mass production of the antibiotic was launched, which saved millions of lives. For this, three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. However, when it comes to the first antibiotic, they only remember

Alexander Fleming, and it was he who in 1999 entered the list of the hundred greatest people of the 20th century, compiled by Time magazine.

Lisa Meitner

In the gallery of the greatest scientists of the past, female portraits are much less common than male portraits, and the story of Lisa Meitner allows us to trace the reasons for this phenomenon. She was called the mother of the atomic bomb, although she rejected all offers to join projects to develop this weapon. Physicist and radiochemist Lisa Meitner was born in 1878 in Austria. In 1901, she entered the University of Vienna, which then opened its doors to girls for the first time, and in 1906 she defended her work on the topic "Thermal conductivity of inhomogeneous bodies."

In 1907, Max Planck himself, as an exception, allowed Meitner, the only girl, to attend his lectures at the University of Berlin. In Berlin, Lisa met the chemist Otto Hahn, and very soon they began joint research on radioactivity.

It was not easy for Meitner to work at the Chemical Institute of the University of Berlin: its head, Emil Fischer, was prejudiced towards women scientists and could hardly tolerate a girl. She was forbidden to climb out of the basement where her and Gahn's laboratory was located, and there was no question of a salary at all - Meitner somehow survived thanks to her father's modest financial support. But none of that mattered to Meitner, who saw science as her destiny. Gradually, she managed to turn the tide, get a paid position, gain the favor and respect of her colleagues, and even become a professor at the university and give lectures there.

In the 1920s, Meitner proposed a theory of the structure of nuclei, according to which they are composed of alpha particles, protons and electrons. In addition, she discovered a nonradiative transition - the same one that is known today as the Auger effect (in honor of the French scientist Pierre Auger, who discovered it two years later). In 1933, she became a full member of the Seventh Solvay Congress on Physics "Structure and Properties of the Atomic Nucleus" and was even captured in a photograph of the participants - Meitner is in the front row with Lenz, Frank, Bohr, Hahn, Geiger, Hertz.

In 1938, with the strengthening of nationalist sentiments in the country and the aggravation of fascist propaganda, she had to leave Germany. However, even in exile, Meitner does not abandon her scientific interests: she continues research, corresponds with colleagues and secretly meets with Hahn in Copenhagen. In the same year, Hahn and Strassmann published a note about their experiments, during which they were able to detect the production of alkaline earth metals by irradiating uranium with neutrons. But they could not draw the correct conclusions from this discovery: Gahn was sure that, according to generally accepted concepts of physics, the decay of the uranium atom is simply incredible. Ghan even suggested that they made a mistake or there was a mistake in their calculations.

The correct interpretation of this phenomenon was given by Lisa Meitner, to whom Hahn told about his amazing experiments. Meitner was the first to understand that the uranium nucleus is an unstable structure, ready to disintegrate under the action of neutrons, while new elements are formed and an enormous amount of energy is released. It was Meitner who discovered that the process of nuclear fission is capable of starting a chain reaction, which, in turn, leads to large emissions of energy. For this, the American press later dubbed her "the mother of the atomic bomb", and this was the only public recognition of the scientist at that time. Hahn and Strassmann, having published a note on the decay of the nucleus into two parts in 1939, did not include Meitner as the authors. Perhaps they feared that the name of a woman scientist, moreover, of Jewish origin, would discredit the discovery. Moreover, when the question of awarding the Nobel Prize for this scientific contribution arose, Gahn insisted that only a chemist should receive it (it is not known whether the spoiled personal relationship played a role - Meitner openly criticized Ghana for collaborating with the Nazis).

And so it happened: Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944, and one of the elements of the periodic table, meitnerium, was named in honor of Lisa Meitner.

Nikola Tesla

Despite the fact that almost everyone has heard the name of Nikola Tesla at least once in their life, his personality and contribution to science still cause large-scale discussions. Someone considers him an ordinary hoaxer and showman, someone is a madman, someone is an imitator of Edison, who allegedly did nothing significant in his entire life.

In fact, Tesla - and his designs - helped invent the entire 20th century. The alternator patented by him today provides the operation of both the vast majority of household appliances and devices, and huge power plants. In total, Tesla received more than 300 patents in his life, and these are only his known developments. The scientist was constantly inspired by new ideas, took up a project and dropped it when something more interesting appeared. He generously shared his discoveries and never got into controversy over authorship. Tesla was incredibly passionate about the idea to light up the entire planet - to give free energy to all people.

Tesla is also credited with cooperation with the special services - allegedly on the eve of World War II, the authorities of the leading world powers tried to recruit a scientist and force him to develop a secret weapon. This is most likely speculation, since not a single reliable confirmation of the cooperation of Tesla and special government structures has survived. But it is known for sure that in the 1930s the physicist himself claimed that he had succeeded in constructing an emitter of a beam of charged particles. Tesla called this project Teleforce and said that it is capable of shooting down any objects (ships and aircraft) and destroying entire armies from a distance of up to 320 kilometers. In the press, this weapon was instantly dubbed "the ray of death", although Tesla himself insisted that Teleforce is a ray of peace, a guarantor of peace and security, since no state would now dare to unleash a war.

However, no one even saw the drawings of this emitter - after Tesla's death, many of his materials and sketches disappeared. The team of the Discovery Channel project "Tesla: Declassified Archives" is taken to shed light on what is probably the most deadly weapon in the history of mankind. the prototype of the fantastic "death ray".