Rudimentary practices that led to great discoveries

Rudimentary practices that led to great discoveries

Once, not so long ago, people were throwing their poop on their windows, the thought of smoking was good for the body, and never washed their hands. It was a good time for tobacco companies and hard times for soap makers, but we like to think that we learned some things from our gross and crude habits of the past. Like, wash your hands and do not throw your own droppings on random passersby.

But some of the rude practices of the past have actually led to great discoveries - some of them so great that they have saved lives and changed medicine / science / history as we know it. So the next time you embarrass yourself with a stupid mistake in front of everyone you love, try to remember those raw but monumental moments in the story and just be grateful that your mistakes have never landed you in a manual , so forever immortalize your stupidity as a great scientific achievement.

1 In case you needed another reason to hate hospitals

For centuries, people treated just about every disease with bleeding. Belly? Do not worry, we'll just cut you up with a dirty knife and let you fill a couple of cups with O negative. Acne? We will cover your face with sucking leeches because it is much more attractive than pimples.

According to the BC Medical Journal, bleeding as a medical treatment has been around for 3,000 years, and for some reason over this entire 3,000 years, it has never happened to anyone they should maybe know if the bleeding ever fixed someone.

Worrying, it turns out that bleeding was not entirely without merit, and by the end of the twentieth century, people had realized that the bleeding leech was not just a way for medieval doctors to torment patients who were going to probably die anyway. The common "medicinal" leech has certain substances in its secretions that actually possess therapeutic properties. Hirudin, for example, is an anticoagulant that leeches use to make sure your blood does not clot en route to their bellies. It was first used medicinally in 1909 and today is used to treat deep vein thrombosis. And in case you're curious, some people still use leeches to treat acne, but it does not seem to be something that most doctors recommend.

2 Solar energy was invented to keep shit technology online

As far as sustainable energy goes, solar is about as modern as it gets. Climate scientists dream of a world powered by solar farms, where we can all Binge TV for hours, do laundry at 14h, and keep our air conditioners set to 68 without having to worry that our laziness will eventually lead to the destruction of the earth. But here's a funny thing about solar energy-according to SolarEnergy.com, the first solar technology was developed in the late 1800s, when raw technology ruled the world. During the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuel reserves seemed bottomless, and people were very happy to pollute the air in the name of keeping these giants, the factories of mutilation of working people. But there were a handful of engineers who wondered if maybe the world's supply of fossil fuels was not bottomless, so they started trying to develop something renewable while the rest of the engineers of the world laughed and pointed at them.

An inventor in particular-a mathematician named Auguste Mouchout-even got up to building a solar engine that boiled water. Mouchout hoped that his invention would replace coal as a source of energy for the still crude and dangerous steam engines of the world, which is quite ironic when you consider that something as modern as a solar engine was designed to not help to replace dangerous and unpredictable steam engines, but to keep it running.

3 Do not you mind if I get my dead hands on your newborn?

There was once a time when hand washing was quaint, and you probably know some 13-year-old who really wants it to have always lived at that time. But most doctors are probably not among those who sneak out of the toilet without washing because doctors understand the lethal power of bacteria. But it was not always like that.

According to NPR, in 1846, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that a maternity hospital with doctors and medical students had a mortality rate five times higher than a maternity hospital in the same hospital with midwives. At one point, it occurred to him that the death service personnel were performing autopsies in the morning and delivering babies in the afternoon, while the midwives were only delivering babies. Perhaps, he theorized, "corpses particles" were transmitted by the hands of doctors to working women. He ordered the doctors to start washing their hands, and the death rate dropped dramatically.

But then the doctors were all, "he blames us totally for killing people, we're not going to wash our hands anymore, it'll show him." So they stopped washing their hands, the death rate came back, and Semmelweis was fired. He ended up in a psychiatric facility where he got the shit shoved out of him and died, rather ironically, of sepsis. But the doctors came to understand that he was right. Finally.

4 This moment when the clear cut had an impressive side effect

There is (hopefully) no one left on earth who will say that open cutting is a good thing. Even people who know clearly that it's not a good thing, it's just that money speaks louder than scientists in the environment. But something good came out of the practice-according to the New Yorker, satellite imagery in 2010 revealed the remains of an ancient civilization in a newly cleared part of the upper Amazon basin. Archaeologists have identified at least 210 sophisticated structures over more than 150 miles.

This was quite late news for all explorers of the early twentieth century who died in search of the mythical "El Dorado." at that time, most people thought it was impossible for humans to build cities deep in the Amazon simply because it was a hostile place. But as it turns out, explorers like Percy Harrison Fawcett, who vanished in 1925 trying to find the lost city, could almost have been on the right track.

The civilization revealed in 2010 was remarkably geometric, with earthworks built like perfect circles or rectangles and roads precisely spaced like modern urban blocks. Some of these cities have been big enough to support up to 5,000 people, which frankly makes all opponents look like bigger Whack-Jobs than guys like Fawcett. And the discovery would not have been possible without a cut in the thinning, although the open cup still sucks and please stop doing it.

5 That moment when a chemical warfare agent turned out to be a life-saving drug

In what is perhaps the world's only example of chemical warfare doing more good than harm, the rude practice of killing people with mustard gas leads directly to a cancer rescue therapy. So, yay chemical war?

According to history, in 1917, the Germans introduced mustard gas on the battlefield-named for its color and smell, not because it was made from the same condiment that we like to put on our hot dogs. The mustard gas caused horrible blisters both inside and out of the soldiers who were exposed to it. During the Second World War, researchers tested similar nitrogen mustards as potential weapons when they noticed that people exposed to them had low white blood cell counts. This has led scientists to wonder if instead of killing people, maybe they could actually save people.

Two Yale pharmacologists decided to answer the question in 1940 by first treating mouse tumors with mustard agents and then testing them on a patient who was suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The patient's tumors narrowed, and chemotherapy was born. If you need some perspective on exactly what this breakthrough meant for cancer patients all over the world - during World War I, chemical warfare of all kinds was responsible for about 30,000 deaths, while chemotherapy has probably saved the lives of millions, or at the very least added a few good years on lives that would otherwise have been cut short.

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6 When two mental illnesses have a psychiatric fist fight

NOT so long ago, psychiatric hospitals could do horrible things in the name of "treatment" and "search" because no one really thought it counted as bad if it happened to a crazy person. In the 1930s, there was this guy named Ladislas von Meduna, who believed that there was a "biological antagonism" between the schizophrenics' brain and epileptics, and did not ask why he thought that because he did not does not make sense, no matter what century you are. Anyway, he postulated that psychologists might be able to treat one by inducing symptoms of the other, so that's what he did, testing a few different drugs before he to install on a called metazol. Eventually, his bizarre theory about not loving each other's mental disorders was debunked, but in the meantime he had shown that the seizures did appear to have some kind of therapeutic effect.

But according to Scientific American, Metazol was awful. The metrazol patients experienced terror, and some of them had to be cornered and forced to take it. So, psychiatrists felt compelled to find something better, and that's when someone had the idea of ​​inducing electricity crises instead, and who came up with his own set of horrors , until the technique has been refined into medically accepted practice, it is Today.

7 Do not worry about this nuclear fusion. Here, a mushroom

Failure to obtain informed consent is at the root of a fairly large number of the world's ills. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, people were systematically killed because of the negligence of their employers and the insidious machinery they worked with, and for decades smokers were not told their cigarettes could kill.

In the 1980s, there was a nuclear accident in Chernobyl, and the Russian government decided it was best not to rush people into an evacuation because they did not want to look guilty like hell . According to the story, it took more than a day for them to finally evacuate the 50,000 people living in the vicinity of Pripyat, and people in the surrounding areas were kept in darkness-no one administered potassium iodide, which is now the standard procedure for radiation exposure, and people were basically told to continue living their lives as usual and to do some seriously questionable things like eating local mushrooms.

It seems terrible to say that a nuclear disaster could have a silver lining, but it did - medical science in general has acquired much of its current knowledge about radiation exposure from Chernobyl patients, and just about everything we know about how to prepare for a nuclear disaster came from those dark days in Russia. And today, Pripyat and Chernobyl are must-see tourist destinations so, you know, there is that too.

8 Your pee could change the world

If you define "gross" as seriously disgusting, here's a really rude thing that led to a great discovery: a guy pissing in beakers and then collecting pee from other people and putting him in beakers and then sort of getting himself find with 1,500 gallons of others pissing people that he could then put in more beakers.

Hennig Brand was an alchemist, and he called himself "doctor brand" although like his flight counterpart TARDIS, nobody knew exactly why he was qualified for the title. Dr. Brand, who lived in the 1600s, got his Pee-as-a-chemical-of-science-interest ideas from a book on alchemy, which said that a mixture of concentrated human urine plus a couple of other ingredients could turn the base metals into gold, and it never seems to be wondering if the author of the book just wrote that for him to laugh hysterically at the thought of someone pissing in the beakers.

Because this is not already raw enough, Gizmodo says doctor brand let the urine stew in the hot sun for weeks until it was disgusting and then he boiled until he was more disgusting and then he extracted and mixed together all the most disgusting parts and eventually finished with a "shining, white liquid" that burst into flames when exposed to oxygen. His discovery was phosphorus, which is used today to make weapons and also fireworks, so Boo and Yay, respectively. AlChimie, baby!

9 Also, your laziness could change the world

And finally, here's a story of how a person's gross practices can save millions of lives totally by accident.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a French scientist named Edward Benedictus struck a beaker. Fortunately, the beaker was not filled with anyone else's pee, but it did not behave strangely enough for a broken beaker. Instead of breaking up into a million small pieces that would still appear at random moments to slice open his hands, no matter how he swept through the cracked glass ... but kept his shape.

According to Penn State University, Benedictus later discovered that his lab assistant had done a shitty job of cleaning the glassware, and the inside of the beaker was coated with cellulose nitrate, which formed a thin film inside when it dried. The accidental discovery led to the invention of safety glass, which is the main reason why we are not shredded by broken glass when we are unlucky enough to be involved in a car accident. (The modern security glass is made using a different process, but breaks in a harmless way as well.)

So just in case you thought nothing could be acquired to be super lazy all the time, well, you're wrong. It is actually possible to achieve great things by doing a half-assed job and do not care about the quality of your work. You're welcome.

الوسوم: SCIENCE