Edward Frankland

Edward Frankland was born on January 18, 1825 at Churchdown, near Garstang in Lancashire the illegitimate son of a prosperous lawer. A percocious learner, he knew his letters by age 2 and at age 3 he was sent to a Dame's school in Manchester, where his mother was staying. He wrote of his devotion to the master, James Willasey, who he later assisted after the school closed and was left in poverty. From Dr. Willasey he learned to speak French without an accent and became interested in physical science. The last school he attended was Lancashire Grammar School where he learned Latin, which he hated.

At age fifteen he was apprenticed to a druggist. Frankland in his writings speaks of the six years of his apprenticeship as wasted time, calling it, "six years' continuous hard labor, from which I derived no advantage whatever, except the facility of tying up parcels neatly." Despite his complaints, he was able to make use of what little free time he had and borrow apparatus from his master to perform some basic experiments with the other apprentices.

In 1845, at the termination of his apprenticeship, Frankland traveled to London, where he was able to gain a position in the laboratory of Dr. Lyon Playfair, who had just been made the chemist to the Government Department of Woods and Forests. Although Dr. Playfair was often absent on official duties, Frankland made friends with his chief assistant, Mr. Ransom, who introduced him to the world of chemical analysis. So rapid was his progress that after six months he was offered the position as Playfair's lecture assistant.

In 1847 he went to Marburg, Germany, where he briefly worked in the laboratory of Robert Bunsen. But soon had to return to England, where he had a teaching position at the new Queenwood College in Hampshire. The position required him to lecture not only in chemistry but also botany and geology in addition to setting up the school's laboratory. At his new post he also had the opportunity to meet John Tyndal, who later would become a physics professor at the Royal Institution. During this time the two would rise early and while Frankland would study mathematics under Tyndal's direction, Frankland taught Tyndal chemistry.

In 1848 both Frankland and Tyndal traveled to Marburg, where Frankland continued his research and finished his Ph.D. His work on organometalic compounds laid the basis for his discovery of chemical valence. The compounds he was working with, zinc dialkyls, only combined in certain whole number ratios, an idea that Lavosier had found when working with the break down of water. This led Frankland to realize what he called atomicity, that we now call valence, that "the combining power of the attracting element is always satisfied by the same number of atoms." For twenty years he conducted research, from 1848 to 1868, into the nature of the combining capacity or valency of various elements.

The idea of valency is that the various elements all have a fixed number of bonds that they can form. For example hydrogen will always form only one bond, oxygen two, nitrogen three and carbon four. Frankland's legacy is this idea that elements will form a fixed number of chemical bonds, an idea that was slow in being accepted, but now is the basis of structural chemistry.

In 1865 he was appointed professor of the Royal School of Mines at South Kensington and the Royal College of Chemistry. Frankland was knighted in 1897, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's jubilee, for his thirty years of analyzing the pollution in municipal water supplies, a position he was appointed to in 1868. He died two years later on August 9, 1899.

References:

Obituary Notice: William Frankland; American Chemical Journal Vol. 22 (1899) p.410-411

Sir Edward Frankland K.C.B., F.R.S.; Nature Vol. 60 (1899) p.372

Aiado, Tel; Chemist William Frankland; online at great-scientists.suite101.com

Tilden, William; Famous Chemists: The Men and Their Work; George Routledge and Sons; 1921

Norman George Heatley

Norman Heatley was born on January, 10 1911 in Woodbridge, Suffolk, his parents' only surviving child. His father, Thomas, was a veterinarian and he would often travel with his father to the surrounding farms. From his father he inherited the ability to work on a small scale. In an era of train travel, when everybody traveling carried with them a basket with things for tea and breakage was unavoidable, the ability to repair broken crockery was a useful skill.

At age seven he was sent to boarding school at St. Felix School, near Ipswitch, which he later called, "The nearest thing to Lord of the Flies I had ever heard of." The next year he was enrolled at Westbourne House, a boarding school in Folkstone. It was there that each week an elderly man came to the school and gave Heatley and the other students a lesson on practical science. It was these "re-letter lessons of the week" which sparked Heatley's interest in science.

In 1929 he entered St. John's College, Cambridge graduating in 1933 with a degree in natural science. He stayed on at Cambridge to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Dunn Institute of Biochemistry, completing his dissertation on "The Application of Microchemical Methods to Biological Problems". After graduating Heatley intended to set up an analytical service but after interviewing with Howard Florey he got a temporary job doing microchemical analysis at Oxford.

Florey's group was investigating antimicrobial substances and Ernst Chain, one of Florey's workers, had found paper by Alexander Fleming about the antibacterial properties of a mold called Penicillium Notatum. Chain's role was to find the structure of the antibacterial compound while Florey would determine its effects. While it soon became clear that this new substance was more effective in killing bacteria than anything currently available, the group was hindered by the fact that there was no test to determine the activity of the new compound and the currently used methods of extracting interesting compounds from the growth medium did not work on it. Heatley was able to solve both of these problems, devising a new unit for activity, called "Oxford units", and a two step extraction process.

By May 1940 the group was convinced that they had an important new antibacterial drug on their hands, with Heatley playing a key role in the experiment that had proved its worth. Heatley had injected 8 mice with virulent bacteria, four of which also received an injection of penicillin a hour later. Overnight he watched as the four mice without the penicillin injection die and while the other four, with penicillin injections, survived. Now the problem was to be able to produce enough penicillin for the much larger human system.

Due to the war British Pharmaceutical companies were unwilling to expend effort on a project involving an unproven drug and Florey and his team were forced to carry the project out on their own. The first thought to scale up their production using glass cultureware. It was quickly discovered that this would be prohibitively expensive and the group was forced to use cheaper ceramic cultureware designed by Heatley. The process, developed by Heatley, produced a white powder that was only about 1% penicillin, but was effective in fighting bacterial infections in humans.

Because it was war time and the threat of a German invasion was real, the group had to be prepared to destroy all its work, lest it fall into enemy hands. To ensure that all would not be lost Florey and his group seeded their lab coats with Penicillium spores, which were stable for years and could be used to regenerate their work.

On June 26, 1941 Florey and Heatley, took a blacked out Pan-Am Clipper seaplane bound for New York. The Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded Florey's group, urged Florey to come to America in order to find firms that would be interested in production of the new antibacterial drug. Unable to get any drug companies to continue his research Florey soon returned to England. Heatley stayed on, working at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois were he was assigned to work with A.J. Moyer. Heatley soon found that Moyer was carrying out his own research, not telling him what he was doing. Later Moyer used his solo research to apply for a patent on the new drug. The English would be forced to pay royalties for the use of penicillin, which they had discovered.

Heatley returned to Britain in July 1942. He went back to Oxford where he continued his work on penicillin until 1943. In 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery of Penicillin. Heatley was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Medicine from Oxford in 1990, the first given in its 800 year history. The Heatley Medal and Prize, given by the Biochemical Society, is awarded "for exceptional work that makes biochemistry widely accessible and usable, and for achievements that enable widespread progress and understanding."

Norman Heatley died on January 5, 2004.

References:

"Making Penicillin Possible: Norman Heatley Remembers" at sciencewatch.org

Evans, Ruth; "Norman Heatley"; The Guardian; Jan, 8 2004

Lax, Eric; The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle; Holt Paperbacks; 2004

O'Conner, Anahad; "Dr. Norman Heatley, Pioneer of Penicillin Supply, Dies"; New York Times; January 17, 2004

Nobel Prize in Medicine 1945 at nobelprize.org

The Heatley Prize at biochemistry.org

William Wilson Morgan

Dr. William Wilson Morgan was born on January 3, 1906 in Bethesda, Tennessee. Dr. Morgan, the son of Southern Methodist missionaries, moved frequently so he and his younger sister were initialy educated by their mother. At age 9 he went to school for the first time in Perry, Florida, then in Colorado Springs and he finished 8th grade in Poplar Bluff, Missouri in 1919. He finished his first two years of high school at Marvin Junior College in Fredricktown, Missouri and finished his last two at Central High School in Washington D.C.

In 1923 Dr. Morgan started his undergraduate study at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia finishing three years of classes before he joined the staff of Yerkes observatory after being recommended by Dr. Benjamin Wooten, Dr. Morgan's physics professor who had spent a summer at Yerkes, for a job taking daily spectroheliograms. Dr. Edwin Frost had been desperately searching for somebody to continue a series of spectroheliograms that had been taken daily for thirty years. At Yerkes, he was able to finish his bachelors by taking astronomy graduate courses and only set foot on the University of Chicago campus to sign up for the degree. He stayed at the observatory and finished his Ph.D. in 1931.

After finishing his doctorate he remained at Yerkes and began teaching a few years later, making full professor in 1947. He remained at Yerkes for 68 of his 88 years and was director from 1960 to 1963. From 1947 to 1952 he served as editor of the Astrophysical Journal. He was awarded the Bruce Medal by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1958 and was awarded the Herschel Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1983.

Dr. Morgan made numerous contributions to astronomy, including extending the Harvard system for classifying stellar spectra to include luminosity (named the MK system after Dr. Morgan and his colleague Dr. Philip Keenan), developing a system to determine the distance to remote stars more accurately, and demonstrating the existence of super giant galaxies. In 1951 he received a standing ovation from a meeting of the American Astronomical Society when he announced his discovery of two spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.

Because astronomers are unable to look at our home galaxy from the outside and at the time were limited to earthbound observations it was difficult for astronomers to determine the shape of the Milky Way. Dr. Morgan's observations allowed him to determine that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy, similar in shape to the Andromeda nebula.

Dr. Morgan died on December 21, 1994.

References:

Garrison, R. F.;"William Wilson Morgan (1906-1994)"; Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; (1995)107:507-512

Osterbrock, Donald E.;"William Wilson Morgan"; Biographical Memoir at National Academy Press

Wilford, John Noble; "William Wilson Morgan dies at 88; a leading U.S. astronomer"; New York Times; June 24, 1994

William Wilson Morgan's Bruce Medalist page at www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu

David Hendricks Bergey

David Hendricks Bergey was born on the Mennonite meetinghouse farm in Shippack township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania on December 27, 1860. As was the custom for boys on the farm he attended school during the winter and worked the farm during the summer. After turning 18 he attended private and normal schools and taught two winters in rural schools before he decided to study medicine. He started his medical training in the office of Dr. Samuel Wolfe of Shippack, PA.

He went to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a B.A. and M.D. simultaneously in 1884 at a time when the discoveries of Luis Pasteur and Robert Koch was causing much discussion in American bacteriology circles. Dr. Bergey went to work in the laboratory of Dr. Henry Formad, who had made two visits to Dr. Koch's laboratory. It was here that Dr. Bergey was introduced to bacteriology.

For nearly ten years Dr. Bergey practiced medicine in North Whales, PA, before returning to the University of Pennsylvania in 1893 first as a student and then as a Scott Fellow in Hygiene in the newly built laboratory of Hygiene. In 1895 he was appointed assistant in chemistry, in 1903 he made assistant professor and in 1926 full professor of hygiene and bacteriology.

Dr. Bergey was responsible for numerous publications during his lifetime but he is best remembered for the manual of bacterial classification that is named after him. The first edition of the manual was published in 1923 by the Society of American Bacteriologists (now the American Society of Microbiologists). Dr. Bergey served as the chairman of the editorial board for the manual. Dr. Bergey had begun preparing the manual soon after he had been the president of the society in 1915 in order to replace the old system of bacterial classification outlines to fit newer knowledge. The manual, which still bears his name, has been constantly revised and is still used today as a standard reference of bacterial classification.

Dr. Bergey died on September 5, 1937. The Bergey award and Bergey medal, awarded for contributions to bacterial taxonomy, given out annually by the Bergey manual trust, are named after him.

References:

Breed, Robert; "David Hendricks Bergey"; Journal of bacteriology(1938)vol.35:p.I2-345

"History of Bergey's Manual" at cme.msu.edu

David Hendricks Bergey, Wikipedia entry

Bergey's Manual Trust Website

Thomas Graham

Thomas Graham was born in Glasgow on December 21, 1805 the the eldest of seven children of a merchant father. After attending preparatory school and high school he started classes at the university of Glasgow in 1819, where he studied under Thomas Thompson. He remained there for seven years taking an M.A. in 1826. His father wanted him to go into the Scottish church, but Thomas showed an aptitude for mathematics and science and against his father's wishes he commenced on a career in science.

Graham was a lecturer in chemistry at the Mechanics Institution in Glasgow and then he was appointed professor of chemistry at Andersonian University in Glasgow. It was at this point that he was able to devote more time to experimentation and the seven years he spent at Andersonian were busy. In 1837 he was appointed professor of Chemistry at London University (now University College, London) where he occupied the chair until 1855 when he succeeded Sir John Herschel as Master of the Mint and remained in that positon until he died.

Graham is best remembered for his discovery that under the same temperature and pressure the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its atomic mass. A demonstration of this can be found here. Basically this law means that the smaller the atomic mass of the gas the faster it will diffuse. Graham was awarded the Keith prize in 1834 by the Royal Society of Edinburgh for this discovery.

Graham is also remembered for his invention of dialysis. Between 1861 and 1864 Graham, while he was studying the ability of dissolved substances to pass through a membrane, noticed that substances that crystallized well like salt passed well through the membrane and substances that did not crystallize like gelatin did not. He distinguished these two classes of substances as crystalloids and colloids. This discovery led to the dialysis that is done on kidney patients today.

Graham is also remembered for is characterization of phosphates in solution. For all of these discoveries Graham was awarded the Copley medal of the Royal Society in 1862.

Graham died on September 16th, 1869.

References:

Williamson, A.W.; Obituary in Nature, Volume 1, (1869) p. 20-22

Obituary in the Proceedings of the Royal Society; Volume 18 (1870) p. xvii-xxvi

Obituary in the Lancet; Volume 2 (1869) p. 456-457

Plimer, Robert Henry Aders; Practical Organic and Biochemistry Chemistry; Logmans, Green and Company; 1920

Mary L. Caldwell

Born on December 18, 1890, Mary Letitia Caldwell was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries working in Colombia. She attended high school in the United States and then attended the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in 1913. She taught there for five years following her graduation. She then went to Columbia University, where she studied under Henry S. Sherman and obtaining a M.A. and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. She stayed at Columbia first as an instructor and then a full professor in 1948. She was the only woman to be a senior chemistry faculty member at the time.

Mary Caldwell's research centered on enzymes that use starch as a substrate, particularly amylases. She was the first person to purify porcine pancreatic amylase, an enzyme that is used both in industry and research. She also established that amylase is a protein. Amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starches into individual carbohydrate units.

Although Mary Caldwell suffered from a progressive muscular disorder, she never changed her office on the 9th floor of Chandler Hall. She retired in 1959 and was awarded the Garvan Medal by the American Chemical Society in 1960.


References:

Mary Letitia Caldwell, Journal of Chemical Education online

Ogilvie, M.; The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives From Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century; p.220-1; Routledge; 2000

Barbosa, Patty; "Mary Letitia Caldwell"; in The Data Bank of Scientists at csupamona.edu

Theodor Schwann

Theodor Schwann was born on December 7, 1810 in Neuss, near Dusseldorf, in Rhenish Prussia, which at the time was a providence of the French Empire. Theodor was the fourth of thirteen children of a goldsmith who had set up a successful printing business. From his father Theodor inherited a proclivity for working with his hands which suited him well in his scientific career. He spent the play hours of his childhood building miniature physical instruments from primitive materials.

Theodor attended a Jesuit college in Cologne and went to the University of Bonn, where after initially studying theology, his natural inclination for science led him to study medicine, studying under Johannes Muller. Muller, recognizing Schwann's abilities, made him an associate and they researched the motor and sensory roots of spinal neurons and blood coagulation. Schwann migrated to Warzburg, and then to Berlin to finish his doctorate and again work with Muller.

In Berlin Schwann became an aid at the Anatomical Museum of which Muller was the director. It was during this time that Schwann laid the basis for the study of nervous and muscle tissue that others would elaborate on. Schwann was one of the first to deal with living tissue on only a chemical and physical basis, ignoring the aid of "vital force". Schwann also discovered that alcoholic fermentation and the fermentation that causes putrefaction were carried out by microbes, a discovery that was ignored and even ridiculed at the time. Adept with the microscope, Schwann was the first to find the thin layer of cells on the inside of blood vessels, which would later be called the endothelium and confirmed the observation of Robert Remark of the cellular sheath around nerve cells, the cells of which would later be named after Schwann.

All of this work would have been enough for Schwann to be considered a great scientist, but Schwann is most famous for his elaboration of the cell theory of biology. In 1839 Schwann published "Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Growth and Structure of Animals and Plants", in which he continued the work that Matthias Schleiden had started with plants and identified the cell as the basic unit of living tissue in animals. The discovery was prompted when Schwann was having lunch with Schleiden. Schleiden was describing the nuclei he had found in plant cells and Schwann recognized that he had seen similar structures during his microscopic examinations of animal tissues. The two went to the anatomy theater (this was at Louvin where in 1839 Schwann had been appointed professor of anatomy) where Schwann showed Schleiden animal cell nuclei. From this point on Schwann dedicated his research to studying animal cells.

After all of his early success Schwann did little active research. In 1848 he was called to the University of Liege, where he remained till his death. In 1875 he published an indignant pamphlet denouncing the Catholic clergy for claiming that he testified in favor of the miraculous nature of the appearance of stigmata on Louise Lateau and he died in 1882 at the age of 72.


References:

"Theodor Schwann"; Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Vol. 17 (1882) p. 460-1

"Heroes of Medicine: Theodor Schwann"; The Practitioner; Vol. 59 (1897) p.498-501

Kettenmann, Helmut; Ransom, Bruce R.; Neuroglia; Oxford University Press, USA; 2004

Leon, Fredericq; "Sketch of Theodor Schwann"; The Popular Science Monthly; Vol. 37 (1897) p.257-264

Otis, Laura; Muller's Lab; Oxford University Press, USA; 2007