Word: leeuwenhoek
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Anton Von Leeuwenhoek is famous for scraping the plaque off the exceedingly dirty teeth of the elderly men of Delft. He is still remembered today for his crude attempt at oral hygiene because he was the first person to describe bacteria and a host of other “cavorting beasties” that were visible in the plaque under his crude microscopes. (Leeuwenhoek originally called them “wretched beasties,” but time has been kind to the bacteria.) He described them jumping about with their grotesque appendages and strange methods of locomotion. He collected...
...spirit of the Dutch republic was tolerant, and Leeuwenhoek was left to collect samples from the teeth of old men, from fresh rainwater and from tidal pools on the coast. If Leeuwenhoek lived today, he might have been hassled by another set of beasties who make their homes not in pond water but in Washington. According to the twisted logic of a passel of ethicists, scientists and others hand-picked by the Bush administration, scraping a sample from an old man’s gums to peer at it under a microscope could be ethically questionable...
...committee would wish to drag out the debate over cloning. After all, some members make their money pontificating about the immorality with which science threatens humanity. They sometimes treat scientists (who composed less than one-fifth of the committee) much like the Royal Society of London treated Leeuwenhoek when he began sending them his observations of microbes—that is, with a hint of bemused paternalism. Leeuwenhoek was an unschooled man who spoke only Dutch and felt patronized by the great learned men of London...
...something else is going on, and I think Malthus may have sensed it coming. As long ago as 1679, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (the Dutch inventor of the microscope) speculated that the limit to the human population would be on the order of 13 billion--remarkably close to many current estimates. For our position in the natural world is once again undergoing a sea change. We are not the first nor are we the only species to spread around the globe, but we are the first to do so as an integrated economic entity. Other species maintain tenuous genetic connections...
...Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water. The invention of logarithms and calculus led to more accurate clocks and optical instruments...