Word: leeuwenhoek
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...