Sciencefare: August 26, 1982 by Dr. Frederick A. Aldrich
"Nothing happens unless first a dream" - Carl Sandburg (1922)
It isn't everyone who writes down their dreams when awakened in the middle of the night. Perhaps more scientists should. Otto Loewi, of Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, did just that. I'm not referring t o Otto Lowy, the Austrian who survived the Nazi death camps and with whom we can tour his beloved Vienna each week aboard CBC's "The Transcontinental". "My" Otto Loewi, born in 1873 on June 3rd, was an eminent physiologist and pharmaco logist whose work led him to study the hypothesis that neurons interact across synapses through chemical mediators. This was in the early 1920's.
J. N. Langley, back in 1900, had come close to a full understanding of the role of adrenaline in neural stimulation. One of his students, T. R. Elliott, even published that "Adrenaline might be t he chemical stimulant liberated on each occasion when the impulse arrives..." In England, some two decades later, Henry Hallett Dale, later Sir Henry, working on the pharmacology of ergot, became interested in the choline ester of acetic acid, or ac etylcholine. Ergot is a drug derived from the fungus Claviceps purpurea which causes a diseased condition in rye and other cereals. For centuries it had been used to control hemorrhage and to induce labour by causing uterine contraction. The ace tylcholine had been isolated by Reid Hunt back in 1906, and it had been demonstrated that it exerted a powerful dilator action on blood vessels. This is a story so characteristic of scientific research. Contributions come from many sources, some obvious ly contributory, others less so, and some not even recognizable as such. | |
|
