This month, we’re starting a new series delving into snapshots of science history and their lasting impact on the modern world. In honor of Juneteenth, we’ll start with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study—a clinical study that contributed greatly to the erosion of trust between the healthcare industry and the Black community. This broken trust has had a lasting negative effect on the health of Black people and on the diversity of clinical trials. Diverse clinical trials are crucial to ensuring that new treatments are effective and safe for all the populations they are used in. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black people…
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In 1951, two years before the double-helical structure of DNA was discovered, Barbara McClintock gave a lecture on her newest research into maize genetics, which revealed something truly surprising—certain genes were able to jump from one region of the genome to another. These jumping genes appeared to have a pronounced effect on the regions where they landed, disrupting and inactivating nearby genes. In maize (i.e., corn), these effects were easily visualized as changes in the color pattern of kernels over generations. Despite compelling evidence, McClintock’s lecture was met with confusion and open hostility from the scientific community because it conflicted…
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For the last entry in our Black History Month series, we’re discussing Emmett Chappelle, the biochemist hired by NASA to develop tests and methods to identify microbial life on the surface of Mars. Of course, life has never been found on the red planet, but like many other innovations originally developed for space, Chappelle’s inventions have found new purpose here on Earth. One of his most notable discoveries was luciferase, the enzyme found in fireflies that glows when it reacts with the protein luciferin in the presence of ATP—the currency of life. Because luciferase only reacts with luciferin when there…
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As we finally exit the long slog that was 2020 and enter the new year, the topic on everyone’s mind right now is vaccination. With the recent FDA approval of both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, many of our long-standing questions and concerns about vaccination have come to the forefront of public consciousness—especially since these new vaccines are pioneering a relatively novel method of vaccination. Vaccination itself may seem like a relatively recent endeavor, a product of 20th-century science and public health initiatives. And while the first laboratory-concocted vaccine wasn’t created until 1879, the legacy of vaccines and inoculation against…
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To close out this difficult year, this month’s blog series is going to look back at a few of the titans of scientific discovery from years past. This week, we return to the topic of nuclear fission with the story of Lise Meitner—an Austrian physicist who discovered the fundamental mechanism behind nuclear fission. Meitner’s story is pocked with the sexism and anti-Semitism that characterized Europe in the early 1900s. But despite the adversity she faced, Meitner made one of the most pivotal scientific discoveries of her time—one that would make nuclear power (and nuclear bombs) possible. Lise Meitner was born…
Continue readingThe Ghosts of Science Past: Part 1—Lise Meitner and the Discovery of Nuclear Fission
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