8 Unusual Lessons in Science and History
The truth is always weirder than you think
Animals grow from babies to adults, not the other way around. That’s what experience teaches us, and largely what the rules of bio-science teach us, too. It’s just sometimes false. Turns out, there are a lot of stories in science and medicine that turn our ideas on their heads. Fancy a bit of weird? Here are eight strange things from science you likely never knew:
ONE: Some Animals Grow Backwards.
Sometimes called the “immortal jellyfish,” the peculiar dohrnii jellyfish cheats death by reverting to a polyp (a baby jelly). There are plenty of cases where animals can regrow limbs, from salamanders to star fish, and certain types of microscopic creatures, like Tardigrades, than can go dormant for long periods and then return to life. But what makes the dohrnii unique has to do with reversing the usual patterns of growth we’ve come to expect.
Like most creatures, the jelly begins with sperm and egg. It then matures into a free-swimming larva, and then — curiously — into a polyp that sticks to the seafloor, a bit like a small coral. Then, when the time is right, the polyp buds and becomes a mature jellyfish. However, if the environment gets difficult, or the jelly is attacked and injured, it revert to a polyp. It would be like turning yourself into a toddler again. Neat trick, eh?
TWO: Safety Glass Started as a Neat Gift for Royals.
We are used to thinking of scientific experiment and breakthrough as an intentional process. There is a problem, and science and engineering look for a solution. In fact, lots of developments are accidental — and sometimes, even overlooked.
Something called Prince Rupert’s drops look a bit like a glass tadpole with an extra long tail. Rupert of Bavaria first made them by dropping molten glass into cold water. He presented the resulting sinuous structures to Britain’s King Charles II in 1660. But they weren’t just for show; the drops had two impressive qualities. First, you can hit the bulb with a hammer, and it won’t break. Second, and more impressively, it you snap the tail — the entire structure completely dissolves into glass dust. (It’s worth watching the video). It took material science well into the 20th century to figure out why. The surface cools fast, while the interior takes much longer, resulting in zones of high tension and zones of high compressive stress… it was “tempered.”
The combination makes the bulb nearly indestructible, but also totally unstable. The merest disruption at the tail destabilizes everything, with cracks moving at 4,000 miles per hour! Strangely enough, the same idea would be used to make safety glass for car windows; by shattering into glass rubble, instead of shards, it helps protect passengers.
THREE: We Used to Transplant Teeth.
“I would recommend every dentist to have some dead teeth at hand, that he may chance to fit the socket. I have known these sometimes to last for years.”
— John Hunter, on transplant teeth, 1778
In 1748, the famous anatomist John Hunter became the surgical consultant to a tooth-drawer. Dentistry, says surgeon and historian Nicholas Tilney, “was a primitive, dangerous, and painful field filled with eccentrics, quacks, and showman” — an experimental science in a field where six-hundred deaths per year in London alone could be attributed to teeth.
Hunter did not practice dentistry himself. However, he did make a startling discovery about the nature of teeth. A living tooth, extracted, could be transplanted somewhere else. He chose a rooster, plucked out a live human tooth, and transplanted it to the highly vascularized comb on the bird’s head. The relatively inert tooth and the increased blood flow of the comb allowed the tooth to survive, clearing the way for the first human trial. Dentists enthusiastically embraced transplants, paying impoverished young people for their teeth, extracting them for a pittance, and then selling high to nobles and well-monied merchants inclined to improve their smiles. Eventually, however, the implants failed. Gives a whole new meaning to “false teeth,” doesn’t it?
FOUR: Electricity was Used to Shock Dinner Guests.
With the dawn of electricity came new ways of shocking your friends, literally and figuratively. By 1749, the electrical showmen had secured audiences in Philadelphia, and Benjamin Franklin jested of electric parties where “a turkey is to be killed for dinner by the electric shock, and roasted by the electric jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle” (more on that in my last book, here).
Another famous trial coaxed young men into kissing electrified young ladies. A poem published in 1754 described the experience as one that “pained me to the quick” and almost “broke” teeth in the shock. Given that we use electricity to power our world these days, it’s strange indeed to think it began merely as parlor tricks.
FIVE: The First Battery was a (Near Fatal) Accident.
You’ll forgive me for putting in two based on electricity (I have a lot of these anecdotes after writing Clockwork Futures), but this is a favorite. In January of 1746, Pieter van Musschenbroek reported the following to colleagues at the Académie des Sciences in Paris: “I would like to tell you about a new and terrible experiment, which I advise you never to try yourself, nor would I, who have experienced it and survived by the grace of God, do it again for all the kingdom of France.”
Static or Hauksbee generators were all the rage, and Musschenbroek had been using a small hand-crank device (using a glass ball and filaments to generate the static) to give teaching demonstrations. The trouble was, static dissipated. Convinced electricity must be a fluid, he tried to store it in a jar by suspending a wire in water (you probably see where this is going…).
He set the jar on some resin and then charged the wire in the conducting fluid with his machine. It didn’t work. He was building a charge, but electricity needs to close the circuit to make a spark, and resin insulates. One night, he did the experiment the “wrong way,” with no insulator. He touched the top of the jar and its wire and was thrown across the room. A…happy accident, I suppose? He called his device a Leyden Jar, an early battery.
SIX: The Same Fellow Invented Aspirin and Heroine.
I’ve detailed this one in another post, but one of the most surprising things about pharmaceutical history is the shift from relying on plants to make medicine — to relying on, well, trash. Coal tar, an industrial byproduct, had all sorts of helpful elements in it. Carbon. Hydrogen. In the early days of pharma-chemistry, researchers were discovering that, by putting these together in chains, they could artificially manufacture new compounds.
In 1897, Felix Hoffman, a German chemist working for Bayer, created acetylsalicylic acid in this fashion, later named aspirin. A few weeks later, he invented heroin. (One of his superiors named it; it made him feel “heroic.” Aspirin, by contrast, they thought might be too dangerous for the heart. Oh, the irony).
SEVEN: The First Hormone Therapy Involved Transplanting Testicles.
Here is a surprise history that few people know: the first hormone (and trans) therapy clinic was built in 1919 by a German-Jewish man named Magnus Hirschefeld. He would go on to create hormone cocktails to treat a variety of conditions, from impotence to infertility. However, he had been inspired by another sexology researcher, Eugen Steinach.
Steinach began his work in the late 19th century, mostly on mammals, and found that the testes’ interstitial cells produce male sex hormones (testosterone). By the early 20th century, he’d begun to experiment on human beings, calling it the Steinach Rejuvenation Procedure and promising virility. In fact, it was almost billed as the fountain of youth — and getting “Steinached” was “all the rage.” There is a problem with this technique, however . Foreign tissue transplanted into the body is attacked by the human immune system as an invader, and in several cases, the testicle grew infected, and the patient had to be castrated — or die. Sometimes both. (More here).
EIGHT: Vaccines are Named After Cows.
I saved my favorite for last. I used to work in a medical museum, and I loved talking about Edward Jenner. He’s the fellow who sorted out how to inoculate against smallpox, a horrible and disfiguring disease. It goes like this: he noticed that milk maids didn’t get smallpox. Why not? Well, cows often carry cow pox, and the maids would catch a bit of a rash from them. It wasn’t dangerous to humans.
By contrast, smallpox left patients sick, crippled, blind, or dead — it was highly virulent and painful. Realizing that cow pox somehow kept maids safe from small pox (because the less deadly disease helped them develop immunity to the more deadly one), Jenner decided to intentionally infect children with the cow pox. He also practiced on a servant’s child (some problematic ethics there). But let us get to the cow.
In the 18th century, you made medicine respectable by giving it Latin names. Small pox was therefore variolae, or variolae minor. Jenner wanted to use the same means for naming his inoculations, as “cow” didn’t have the right ring to it. Latin for cow turns out to be vaccinae. Protect yourself from small pox, said Jenner, with Variolae Vaccinae! It still worried people; illustrations (like the one above) showed patients turning into cattle. But the treatment worked and protected both adults and children. Over time, the name was shortened to “vaccine” —a word we still use today for the Covid-19 vaccine. (Which also will not turn you into a cow.)
Ah. Science!
