Word: chain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then, unexpectedly, he struck out when he proposed an implausible, three-chain helix for DNA. Several months later, in Cambridge, England, Francis Crick and I, apprehensive that Linus might bat again, found the double helix. Why Linus failed to hit this home run will never be known. His wife Ava Helen is said to have told Linus that he should have worked harder. I believe the decade following World War II may have had too many agonizing moments for the Pauling family...
...improbable chain of events that led Alexander Fleming to discover penicillin in 1928 is the stuff of which scientific myths are made. Fleming, a young Scottish research scientist with a profitable side practice treating the syphilis infections of prominent London artists, was pursuing his pet theory--that his own nasal mucus had antibacterial effects--when he left a culture plate smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria on his lab bench while he went on a two-week holiday...
...specimen of Fleming's mold made its way into the hands of a team of scientists at Oxford University led by Howard Florey, an Australian-born physiologist. This team had technical talent, especially in a chemist named Ernst Boris Chain, who had fled Nazi Germany. Armed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, these scientists made it their objective to identify and isolate substances from molds that could kill bacteria. The mission was inspired by the earlier work of Gerhard Domagk, who in 1935 showed that the injection of a simple compound, Prontosil, cured systemic streptococcal infections. This breakthrough demonstrated that...
...scientific tour de force, Florey, Chain and their colleagues rapidly purified penicillin in sufficient quantity to perform the experiment that Fleming could not: successfully treating mice that had been given lethal doses of bacteria. Within a year, their results were published in a seminal paper in the Lancet. As the world took notice, they swiftly demonstrated that injections of penicillin caused miraculous recoveries in patients with a variety of infections...
...seems the academic ball and chain was often unshackled on foreign shores...