A Selected Chronological Bibliography of Biology and Medicine

 

Part 4A

 

1925 — 1936

       

 

Compiled by James Southworth Steen, Ph.D.

Delta State University

 

Dedicated to my loving family

 

This document celebrates those secondary authors and laboratory technicians without whom most of this great labor of discovery would have proved impossible.

 

Please forward any editorial comments to: James S. Steen, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, DSU Box 3262, Cleveland, MS 38733. jsteen08@bellsouth.net

 

1925

"The key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the cell." Edmund Beecher Wilson (1764).

 

“When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.” Alfred North Whitehead (1739).

 

“Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first proposed.” Alfred North Whitehead (1739).

 

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy (AT-DE) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his demonstration of the heterogeneous nature of colloid solutions and for the methods he used, which have since become fundamental in modern colloid chemistry. He developed a dark field ultra-microscope that could detect particles with diameters below the wavelengths of visible light.

 

Ronald Aylmer Fisher (GB-AU) invented the statistical method known as analysis of variance (523).

 

Walter S. Abbott (US) developed a method for computing the effectiveness of insecticides (2).

 

William S. Hoffman (US) isolated adenine nucleotide in crystalline form from pig blood (732).

 

John Mason Gulland (GB) and Robert Robinson (GB) worked out the structure of morphine (649).

 

Treat Baldwin Johnson (US) and Robert D. Cogshill (US) discovered the occurrence of 5-methylcytosine in nature (tubercle bacteria) (801).

Rollin Douglas Hotchkiss (US) and Gerard R. Wyatt (CA) discovered 5-methylcytosine in plant and animal tissues (756; 1797).

 

Gottfried Koller (DE), Earle Bryant Perkins (US), Theodore Snook (US), and Benjamin Kropp (US) found that there is produced in the eyestalks of crustaceans a hormone which, when carried in the blood stream, is effective in inducing chromatophore changes. Koller named this hormone contractin (868-870; 1230-1232).

 

Bernhard Zondek (DE-IL) and Benno Brahn (DE) isolated an estrogenic hormone from the ovarian follicle (1809; 1812).

 

Edouard Chatton (FR) first used the terms prokaryote and eukaryote in his 1925 paper when he suggested that the most significant taxonomic distinction among life forms today is not between plants and animals but between cells with nuclei, eukaryotes, and cells without them, prokaryotes. Pro means before and eu means true, karyote refers to a nut or kernel (248; 249).“Protozoologists agree today in considering the flagellated autotrophs the most primitive of the Protozoa possessing a true nucleus, Eukaryotes (a group which also includes the plants and the Metazoans), because they alone have the power to completely synthesize their protoplasm from a mineral milieu. Heterotrophic organisms are therefore dependent on them for their existence as well as on chemotrophic Prokaryotes and autotrophs (nitrifying and sulphurous bacteria, Cyanophyceae.” This is a translation by Jan Sapp (CA) from the 1938 reference (1351).

Eukaryotes are now placed in the domain Eucarya while prokaryotes are placed in either the domain Bacteria or Archaea.

André Michel Lwoff (FR) used the word eukaryote (1012).

Ellsworth C. Dougherty (US) proposed the prokaryotic-eukaryotic dichotomy. He used the words eukaryon (Greek: true kernel) for the nucleus of “higher organisms” and prokaryon (Greek: before kernel) for the moneran nucleus. (422).

Roger Yate Stanier (CA) and Cornelis Bernardus Kees van Niel (NL-US) later defined bacteria by conceptualizing two new biological entities, "prokaryotes" and "eukaryotes." They argued that the cells of all living things were either prokaryotic or eukaryotic, depending on their pattern of cellular organization. They defined eukaryotes as cells containing membrane-bound structures called organelles, the most important of which was the nucleus. By this definition, all cells of multi-cellular plants and animals were eukaryotes. Cells that lacked membrane-bound cell nuclei, like bacteria and blue-green algae, were designated prokaryotes. The term prokaryote implicitly elevated bacteria to equivalent biological status with all other organisms, to be known as eukaryotes (1489). This represents the resurrection and embellishment of an idea first conceived by Edouard Chatton (FR).

Robert George Everitt Murray (CA) proposed Procaryotae as a taxon “at the highest level” and described it as “a kingdom of microbes…characterized by the possession of nucleoplasm devoid of basic protein and not bounded from cytoplasm by a nuclear membrane.” He suggested Eucaryotae as a possible taxon at the same level to include other protists, plants, and animals (1155).

 

Erwin Broun Fred (US), Ira Lawrence Baldwin (US) and Elizabeth McCoy (US) published the definitive text on nitrogen fixation (547).

 

Agnes Robertson Arber (GB) authored Monocotyledons; a Morphological Study, which developed the thesis, first suggested by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (CH), that the monocot leaf is derived from a dicot petiole (phyllode theory) (50).

 

Thurlow Nelson (US) implicated the ctenophore Mnemiopsis as a predator on oyster larvae in inland coastal waterways along the New Jersey coast (1164).

 

Emil-Karl Frey (DE) observed in 1925 a considerable reduction in arterial blood pressure when he injected human urine into dogs. Unlike many other contemporary scientists, he did not attribute this effect to a toxic action of urine, but rather as the specific activity of an unknown substance with potential biological functions (553; 554).

Heinrich Kraut (DE), Emil-Karl Frey (DE) and Eugen Werle (DE) reasoned that, “It is a substance that probably originates from several organs, is eliminated by the kidneys and has a pronounced cardioactive and vasoactive effect: a substance that is assigned the role of a hormone in the organism”. This F-substance was then called kallikrein, since it was considered to have originated in the pancreas (Greek synonym: kallikreas) (877).

Eugen Werle (DE), W. Götze (DE), A. Keppler (DE), and M. Grunz (DE) identified kallikrein as a proteolytic enzyme (‘ferment’) that liberates the biologically highly active, basic polypeptide ‘DK’ or kallidin (i.e lys-bradykinin) from a blood plasma protein called kallidinogen or kininogen (H- and L-kininogen) (1724; 1725). Its name was later changed to kallidin and that of the precursor to kallidinogen. This work laid the foundation for understanding the system that we refer to today as the kallikrein-kinin system (cascade).

 

George Edward Briggs (GB) and John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (GB-IN) made important refinements in the theory of enzyme kinetics with their steady-state derivation of the single-substrate enzyme saturation curve (175).

 

Earl Perry Cark (US) and James Bertram Collip (CA) reported an important improvement in the methodology for the determination of blood serum calcium (263).

 

Cyrus Hartwell Fiske (US) and Yellapragada Subbarow (IN-US) developed a colorimetric method useful for the detection of phosphorus in organic material (528).

 

Evert Gorter (NL) and Francois Grendel (NL) determined that the area of the monomolecular film formed on a Langmuir trough by the membrane lipids was double the surface area of the erythrocytes from which the lipids had been extracted, suggesting that the cell membrane is bimolecular (632). This was the first evidence that cell membranes are bi-layered.

 

Hans Molisch (CZ), in 1925, obtained the evolution of oxygen by illuminating preparations of dried leaves (1128).

 

Gottfried Samuel Fraenkel (DE-US) discovered that statocysts on jellyfish medussa respond to gravity (541).

 

William Rowan (CH-GB-CA) tested the effect of photoperiodism on migratory drive and reproductive histology in birds. He proved that the annual cycle of changing day-length is the major stimulus for bird migration and is associated with profound physiological change within birds (1320-1324). Note: Before Rowan, it was unknown what environmental cues animals used to time the seasonal changes in their biology. See, Piersma, 1998.

 

Robert Kyle Burns, Jr. (US) established the adequacy of the hormonal theory of sex determination as a general mechanism for vertebrates (201-206). See Frank Rattray Lillie, 1916.

 

Carl Ferdinand Cori (CZ-US) described the rapid absorption of galactose in the intestine, galactose being the most active sugar in this respect (301).

 

Josef von Halban (AT) and Robert Koehler (AT) proved that cessation of internal secretion of the corpus luteum is responsible for the menstrual bleeding in humans (1644).

 

Ernest Henry Starling (GB) and Ernest Basil Verney (GB) isolated dog kidneys, which they supplied with oxygenated blood at controlled flow rates, temperature, and pressure. They found they could produce regular flow rates of normal urine. From their analysis of the urine they determined that the glomeruli generate a protein-free filtrate. They artificially blocked tubular metabolic activity with hydrocyanic acid, collected ureter filtrate, and found that water, chloride, bicarbonate, and glucose are normally reabsorbed from the glomerular filtrate by the tubular cells. They also found that pituitrin (a proprietary preparation of the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland) influenced the re-absorption mechanisms for water and chloride and that without it the mammalian kidney reverted to a urine characteristic of fish and amphibian classes (1497). Note: Vasopressin would later be isolated as the active ingredient in pituitrin.

 

Edwin B. Hart (US), Harry Steenbock (US), Conrad Arnold Elvehjem (US), and James Waddell (US) demonstrated that when rabbits were induced into a state of anemia by milk diet, the addition of ferric salts alone was insufficient to bring about recovery. They discovered that the additional presence of copper is necessary for the animals to synthesize the pyrrol nucleus of hemoglobin (689; 690).

 

Louis Sigurd Fridericia (DK) and Eiler Holm (DK) demonstrated that vitamin A (retinol) is necessary for normal night vision in rats. They also found that both the retinas of A-deficient rats and of rats whose eyes had been strongly illuminated were depleted of visual purple (557).

 

Gaston Ramon (FR) and Pierre A. Descombey (FR) produced a tetanus vaccine from formaldehyde-treated tetanus toxin (1266).

 

Simeon Burt Wolbach (US), Otto A. Bessey (US), and Percy R. Howe (US) concluded that vitamin A (retinol) deficiency in diets led to improper development of teeth and retardation of the growth of the skeleton and that vitamin C deficiency led to a deficiency of formation of intercellular cement substance leading to fragility of blood capillaries (1773-1778).

 

J.H.C. Ruyter (NL) was the first to call attention to the structural peculiarities of unique cells lining the afferent arteriole as it approaches the glomerulus in mice and rats. He suggested that by swelling these cells could occlude the lumen of the afferent arterioles and thereby regulate blood flow to the glomerular capillaries (1331).

Charles Oberling (FR) also reported a distinct group of cells at the same site, this time in the human kidney (1185).

Norbert Oscar Jean Goormaghtigh (BE) named the juxtaglomerular apparatus and suggested that it might have an endocrine function (621).

Norbert Oscar Jean Goormaghtigh (BE) and Keith S. Grimson (US) confirmed that the modified cells in the afferent arteriolar wall of the juxtaglomerular apparatus are endocrine in nature (620; 622-628).

George White Pickering (US), Myron Prinzmetal (US), Juan Carlos Fasciolo (AR), Bernardo Alberto Houssay (AR), and Alberto C. Taquini (AR) rediscovered renin from the kidney as an inducer of hypertension (488; 1239). See Tigerstedt, 1898.

Eduardo Braun-Menéndez (AR), Juan Carlos Fasciolo (AR), Luis Federico Leloir (AR), Juan M. Muñoz (AR), and Irvine Heinly Page (US) determined that renin is an enzyme which acts on a substrate (hypertensinogen) in the plasma converting it to a decapeptide (angiotensin I) (166; 1197).

Leonard T. Skeggs, Jr. (US), Kenneth E. Lentz (US), Joseph R. Kahn (US), Norman P. Shumway (US), and Kenneth R. Woods (US) determined that a serum enzyme (angiotensinase) converts the inactive decapeptide (angiotensin I) to the active octapeptide (angiotensin II) (1448). This activity occurs primarily in the lungs.

William Stanley Peart (GB) demonstrated that the juxtaglomerular apparatus cells produce renin within the kidney (1224).

 

Hugo Fricke (US) measured the electrical capacitance of the surface membrane of erythrocytes, using a high-frequency alternating current bridge (555; 556).

 

Edward M. East (US) and Albert J. Mangelsdorf (US), using Nicotiana tabacum as their research material, laid the foundation for understanding gametophytic self-incompatibility (434).

 

Thomas Hunt Morgan (US), Calvin Blackman Bridges (US) and Alfred Henry Sturtevant (US) showed that chromosome imbalance could produce intersex types in Drosophila.

They also observed that occasionally crosses produced female-biased sex ratios, a clear violation of Mendel’s first law. Daughters from the distorted brood produced an equal number of males and females, but half of their sons produced female-biased sex ratios, whatever the origin of their mates. The remaining grandsons produced normal sex ratios and were shown to have lost the trait (1136).

David Policansky (US) and John Ellison (US) showed that in the Drosophila males producing biased sex ratio offspring there is a high mortality among sperm bearing the Y chromosome. They concluded that in some way a gene on the X chromosome kills sperm bearing a Y chromosome (1248).

 

Felix Bernstein (DE) proposed that the human ABO blood group is inherited in a multiple allele pattern (123).

 

Hermann Joseph Muller, Jr. (US) reported on the mental traits and heredity as studied in a case of identical twins reared apart (1149).

Horatio H. Newman (US), Frank N. Freeman (US), and Karl J. Holzinger (US) presented a large study of heredity and environment in the development of 100 pairs of twins (1169).

 

Sears P. Doolittle (US) and Lewis Ralph Jones (US) demonstrated that Macrosiphum pisi Harris (pea aphid) acts as a vector for pea mosaic virus (418).

 

Henri Vallée (FR), Henri Carré (FR), Paul Rinjard (FR), Otto Waldmann (DE), K. Kobe (DE), Gottfried Pyl (DE), Karl Otto Hobohm (DE), Hubert Moehlmann (DE), and H.S. Frenkel (NL)  produced vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease (549; 550; 1603; 1604; 1678; 1679).

 

Carl Hamilton Browning (GB) defined substances that incite the formation of antibodies and react with them as antigens (183).

 

A smallpox epidemic emerged in Milwaukee, Wisconsin resulting in 386 cases, of whom 87 people died (about 23%). Of the 386 cases, 327 had never been vaccinated, 46 had been vaccinated 10 or more years previously, 11 had been vaccinated more than 5 and less than 10 years previously, 2 had an uncertain vaccination history, and none had been vaccinated within the previous 5 years. Health workers performed about 400,000 vaccinations during the epidemic, and officials enforced quarantine measures and isolation of those infected (1089).

 

John Cunningham (GB), working in India, found that the organism, Borrelia carteri, occurs in two antigenic varieties in human infections of relapsing fever (335). John Cunningham (GB), J.H. Theodore (GB), and A.G.L. Fraser (GB) extended the number of antigenic varieties to nine (336).

 

William George Savage (GB) and Philip Bruce White (GB) laid the groundwork for antigenic analysis of the Salmonella group (1354).

Fritz Kaufmann (DK) greatly extended and refined Savage and White’s work (823).

 

Gaston Ramon (FR) demonstrated that it was possible to augment the antitoxin response to diphtheria and tetanus by administering vaccines with pyogenic bacteria or with various additional compounds (his favorite substance was tapioca). This represents the first occasion on which immunological adjuvants were used. Ramon called them adjuvantes et stimulantes de l’immunite (1265). Note: This discovery indicated a need to involve an inflammatory reaction at the antigen‐injection site to enhance the immune response.

Jules T. Freund (AT-HU-US), Jordi Casals-Ariet (ES-US), and Elizabeth Page Hosmer (US) proposed to add inactivated Mycobacterium tuberculosis to an oil-water emulsion, leading to the popular Freund’s adjuvant (551).

Jules T. Freund (AT-HU-US) and Katherine McDermott (US) made a variation in oil adjuvants, which allowed them to be used with any antigen. They emulsified water in oil with the assistance of a water-miscible lanolin-like material to incorporate both dried inactivated tubercle bacilli and the target antigen in a single aggregate preparation. This was the original Freund’s complete adjuvant that provided a method for inducing antibody formation and cellular responses to substances that are weakly antigenic (552).

Porter Warren Anderson, Jr. (US) and David Hamilton Smith (US), Richard B. Johnston, Jr. (US), Michael E. Pichichero (US), Richard A. Insel (US), Robert Frank Betts (US), and Ronald J. Eby (US) made the first polysaccharide-conjugate vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae to be tested in adults and infants (37; 38). They went on to develop a vaccine, which was a commercial success.

Louis P. Rodriques (US), John B. Robbins (US) Rachel Schneerson (US), James C. Parke, Jr. (US), Clara Bell (US), James J. Schlesselman (US), Ann Sutton (US), Zhen Wang (US), Gerald Schiffman (US), Arthur Karpas (US), and Joseph Shiloach (US) studied the antigenicity of the Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) polysaccharide then developed a clinically acceptable method of binding this polysaccharide to a medically useful protein, tetanus toxoid to form a conjugate vaccine. In sequential studies, their Hib-tetanus conjugate elicited protective levels in mice, rabbits, young rhesus monkeys, and then in human adults, children, and infants. Their achievement opened the door to their and others' development of conjugate vaccines for other bacterial pathogens whose surface polysaccharide could serve as a protective antigen (1308; 1371; 1372).

Francoise Audibert (FR), Louis A. Chedid (FR), Pierre Lefrancier (FR), Jean Choay (FR), and Edgar Lederer (FR) revealed the smallest active adjuvant structure derived from the bacterial peptidoglycan, namely, the muramyl dipeptide (63).

Charles A. Janeway, Jr. (US), in light of the function of adjuvants, redefined the immune response. What used to be defined as nonspecific immunity was renamed innate immunity. Innate immunity and inflammation are more or less two names for a similar mechanism, namely, the defense of the host against infectious or sterile insults (786).

 

William C. Boeck (US) and Jaroslav Drbohlav (US) were the first to develop in vitro cultures of Endamoeba histolytica. They grew it in a diphasic egg slant medium they developed for isolation of intestinal flagellates (149).

 

Harold Robert Dew (AU) reported the histogenesis of the hydatid parasite (Taenia echinococcus) in the pig. He gave a very complete account of the earliest stages of development of the hydatid and of the tissue changes set up in the liver (392).

 

Alfred Stock (DE) wrote about the danger of mercury vapor and concluded that mercury is a poison, which can accumulate in the tissues over a considerable period of time (1510).

 

Martha Schmidtmann (DE) by following the spread of dye in cardiac cells presented the first evidence for a direct intercellular pathway permeable to molecules (1369).

 

Walther Vogt (DE) prepared a fate map that showed where the cells on the surface of an early gastrula would be in the later embryo. That is, he determined the destiny, or fate, of the gastrula cells (1625; 1626).

Nicole Le Douarin (FR), Claude Le Lièvre (FR), and Marie-Aimée Teillet (FR) used chick-quail chimeras to track the fate of neural crest cells and found that many of them migrate to form a variety of structures (942-944).

 

Carl Ferdinand Cori (CZ -US) and Gerty Theresa Cori, née Radnitz (CZ -US) were the first to discover that tumors in the living animal show an abnormally high formation of lactic acid from glucose (306-308). Note: Otto Heinrich Warburg (DE) had previously established that high aerobic and anaerobic glycolysis occurs in tumors in an in vitro environment. 

 

John Thomas Scopes (US) was the defendant in Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, the so-called monkey trial held in Dayton, Tennessee in July 1925, in which a science teacher was arrested for teaching evolution in violation of the state laws at that time. Two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution. Labor lawyer Clarence Darrow led the defense and goaded Bryan into declaring that humans are not mammals (1576).

 

George Hoyt Whipple (US), Frieda Saur Robscheit-Robbins (US), C. Arthur Elden (US), Warren M. Sperry (US), and George B. Walden (US) found that liver, heart, skeletal muscle, ash of liver, ash of kidney, and ash of pineapple promotes regeneration of hemoglobin following severe anemia (1304-1307; 1735; 1736). These results suggested that iron in the diet is important for hemoglobin formation.

 

Thomas Benton Cooley (US) and Pearl Lee (US) reported on two Italian children with symptoms of severe anemia, enlarged spleens and livers, discolored skin and bone alterations (297). Thalassaemia or thalassemia

George Hoyt Whipple (US) and William Leslie Bradford (US) coined the word thalassaemia deriving it from two Greek words - Thalassa meaning the sea and haima meaning blood, literally "sea water in the blood" (1734).

 

Gustav Riehl (DE) described a therapy for deep burn wounds (1294).

 

Arnold Rice Rich (US) concluded that hemoglobin, derived from destroyed erythrocytes, is the sole source of bile pigment; its normal site of origin being in reticuloendothelial cells alone, especially the Kupffer cells, and the epithelial liver cells having no role in the formation, but only in the excretion of the bile pigment (1284).

 

Sanford M. Rosenthal (CA) and Edwin C. White (CA) introduced the bromsulphalein test for hepatic function with its attendant superiority over other tests for liver function (1316).

 

Percival Bailey (US) and Harvey Williams Cushing (US) postulated that medulloblastomas (Bailey coined this name) are derived from embryonic undifferentiated cells in the ependymal lining of the fourth ventricle. They described the characteristic gross and microscopic structure of this tumor, its reddish-gray color, extremely cellular nature, numerous mitotic figures, and the formation of pseudo rosettes. The tendency of this tumor to spread to the leptomeninges, which proved valuable in terms of treatment considerations, was noted. They recommended radiotherapy in the post-operative care of patients with medulloblastomas (70; 72).

 

Walter Edward Dandy (US) reported a case in which he totally removed an acoustic neuroma. He used a unilateral sub-occipital approach during which, following gutting of the tumor, he gently drew the capsule away from the brainstem (355). Dandy's success was due in part to his innovation called ventriculography, which involved x-rays and injecting a gas into the brain's cerebral ventricles for visualizing the tumor. See, Dandy 1918.

 

Percy Sargent (GB) was the first to remove a suprarenal tumor thus reversing virilism in the patient. Gordon Morgan Holmes (GB) described the operation (735).

 

Henry Sessions Souttar (GB) performed a "digital" mitral commissurotomy (closed mitral valvulotomy) (1476).

 

Geoffrey Jefferson (GB) performed the first successful embolectomy in Britain (788).

 

Konstantine Michaelovich Bykov (RU) and Alexei Dmitriev Speranski (RU) were the first to demonstrate experimentally that the bilateral synergic activity of the hemispheres of the brain may be dependent on the corpus callosum and indicated the part the corpus callosum plays in the development of symmetrical reproduction of function in the hemispheres. He severed the corpus callosum in dogs and then used Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning methods to assess the effects of his surgeries. His experiments showed the importance of the corpus callosum for interhemispheric communication (219; 220).

Howard J. Curtis (US) and Archibald Philip Bard (US) used electrical stimulation to prove the point-to-point connection of one side of the cortex to the other by way of the corpus callosum (337).

Andreas Vesalius (Flemish) gave the corpus callosum its name (1620).

 

Howard Christian Naffziger (US) described the phenomenon of the pineal shift on skull x-rays, an important sign for brain tumor localization (1157).

 

John Silas Lundy (US), in 1925, developed the concept of balanced anesthesia. He introduced the idea of combining more than one anesthetic technique—for example, using morphine preoperatively, a regional block to the surgical site, alongside an inhalational anesthetic of ethylene (1010).

 

Hermann Ludwig Blumgart (US) and Otto Christian Yens (US), in 1925, performed the most famous of all radiotracer experiments on humans, the well-known study of arm-to-arm circulation time (144). This ushered in the field of nuclear medicine.

 

Marius Nygaard Smith-Petersen (NO-US) introduced the three-flanged steel nail for insertion across the fracture site in hip fractures, an innovation that considerably improved recovery and mortality rates from hip fractures (1466).

 

Wolfgang Köhler (DE) showed that instead of learning simply by trial and error chimpanzees can solve problems by grasping the relations between means and ends, i.e., they displayed insight (864).

 

Merritt Lyndon Fernald (US) proved that in the northeastern United States some species of plants and animals persisted in areas that escaped glaciation during the Pleistocene (509).

 

Fritz Berckhemer (DE) found a fossil skull of a young female in the Sigrist gravel pit north of Stuttgart, Germany and gave it to Karl Sigrist (115; 116). This, so called, Steinheim skull can be considered a Homo erectus/Homo sapiens transitional form from the Middle Pleistocene, c. 1.3 M BP.

 

Raymond Arthur Dart (AU-ZA) found in material from a limestone quarry at Taung (place of the lion), South Africa a fossil cast of the inside of a primate skull, which fitted into another lump of stone which possibly contained a face. It took Dart about a month to remove enough stone to reveal the face and jaw of a young fossil primate, which would be nicknamed the Taung baby. Dart considered the fossil “an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.” He described it and named it Australopithecus africanus (Southern ape from Africa) and dated it to between 3 and 2.3 M (364). Note: It was placed in the early Pleistocene or late Pliocene. This finding revolutionized ideas about early human evolution after human ancestors and apes split on the evolutionary tree.

Australopithecus africanus existed between 3 and 2 million years ago. It is like A. afarensis, and was also bipedal, but body size was slightly greater. Brain size may also have been slightly larger, ranging between 420 and 500 cc. This is a little larger than chimp brains (despite a similar body size), but still not advanced in the areas necessary for speech. The back teeth were a little bigger than in A. afarensis. Although the teeth and jaws of A. africanus are much larger than those of humans, they are far more like human teeth than to those of apes. The shape of the jaw is now fully parabolic, like that of humans, and the size of the canine teeth is further reduced compared to A. afarensis (281; 797).

 

The American Type Culture Collection was founded. It is a repository and source of known strains of viruses, bacteria, fungi, algae, and eukaryotic cells.

 

Archivos de Neurobiologia, Psichologia, Fisiologia, Histologia, Neurologia y Psiquiatria, now titled Archivos de Neurobiologia was founded.

 

1926

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.…Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” Bertrand Russell (1328).

 

“Life is bottled sunshine” William Winwood Reade (1273).

 

“The striking similarity established by Meyerhof between the changes of carbohydrates in muscle and in the yeast cell is seen to be much closer than has been believed. The remarkable phenomena accompanying alcoholic fermentation are now duplicated in the case of lactic acid production, and it may reasonably be expected that most of the fermentative decompositions of sugars will be found to be initiated in a similar manner.” Arthur Harden (679).

 

“The characters of the individual are referable to paired elements (genes) in the germinal matter that are held together in a definite number of linkage groups…. The members of each pair of genes separate when germ cells mature…. Each germ-cell comes to contain only one set…. These principles…enable us to handle problems of genetics in a strictly numerical basis and allow us to predict…what will occur…. In these respects, the theory [of the gene] fulfills the requirements of a scientific theory in the fullest sense.… It is difficult to resist the fascinating assumption that the gene is constant because it represents an organic chemical entity. This is the simplest assumption that one can make at present, and since this view is consistent with all that is known about the stability of the gene it seems, at least, a good working hypothesis.” Thomas Hunt Morgan (1134).

 

Harland W. Mossman (US) defined the placenta as "apposition or fusion of the fetal membranes to the uterine mucosa for physiological exchange." (1144)

 

Theodor Svedberg (SE) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on disperse systems.

 

Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger (DK) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research indicating that a nematode, Spiroptera carcinoma, caused gastric cancer in rats (513). The hypothesis was later rejected but, nonetheless, had an important role in the development of experimental research on cancer.

 

Gilbert Newton Lewis (US) coined the term photon for the smallest unit of radiant energy (968).

 

The Commission on Units and Measurements defined the röntgen at the Second International Congress of Radiology in Stockholm, Sweden. It was based on ionization of air.

 

Walter Norman Haworth (GB), William Charlton (GB), Stanley Peat (GB), John Vaughan Loach (GB), John Herbert Geoffrey Plant (GB), and Charles William Long (GB) had, by 1928, evolved and confirmed, among others, the structures of maltose, cellobiose, lactose, gentiobiose, melibiose, gentianose, raffinose and the glucoside ring structure of normal sugars (247; 700; 701).

 

Leopold Stefan Ruzicka (HR-CH) analyzed civetone and muscone, two active compounds in natural musk perfumes and found that they consist of very large rings of atoms. He showed that civetone is composed of a 17-membered, and muscone a 15-membered carbon ring. At this time, it was thought that rings with over 6 members were too unstable to exist for long (1332). This paper was submitted in 1924.

 

Karl Lohmann (DE) and Lorand Jendrassik (HU) developed a colorimetric determination of phosphoric acid in muscle extracts (993).

 

Francis Howard Carr (GB) and Ernest Arthur Price (GB) devised a test whereby color observed in samples of oils is a direct measure of vitamin A activity (232).

 

Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin (DE-SE), Christian Barthel (LU), and Karl David Reinhold Myrbäck (SE) found that dried yeast possesses practically the same power of fermentation as fresh yeast although they retain only 1% of the reproductive power (87; 1635).

 

Julio Caesar Tello (PE) was inspired by the discovery in 1910 of the Paracas Textile (c. 100 BCE) at the site of Cabeza Larga on the Paracas Peninsula on the South coast of Peru. In his 1925 excavations Tello found coca leaves placed in an urn, which accompanied the burial of a Peruvian priest, noble, or king from the Nazca period. This is the earliest record of the use of cocoa leaves (1547).

 

Albert Jan Kluyver (NL) and Hendrick Jean Louis Donker (NL) wrote their treatise on the unity of biochemistry in which they stressed that biochemical mechanisms can be investigated using mutant strains of microorganisms and that hydrogen transfer is a basic feature of all metabolic processes (854).

 

Juda Hirsch Quastel (GB-CA) and Barnet Woolf (GB) published the first reported measurement of the equilibrium constant of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction. It was on the aspartate ammonia-lyase reaction (1261).

 

James Batcheller Sumner (US) was the first to obtain an enzyme in pure crystalline form. This was the enzyme urease, which catalyzes the hydrolysis of urea to yield carbon dioxide and ammonia. Sumner had used a 32% solution of acetone in water to precipitate much of the organic material in a jack-bean extract rich in urease activity, while leaving most of the urease activity in solution. After filtering off this precipitate and letting the filtrate stand overnight in the cold, he found that crystals of protein had formed in the filtrate. Study of these protein crystals revealed that they are pure urease enzyme endowed with a specific enzymatic activity enormously greater than that of the original jack-bean extract. It was thus proven that the enzyme urease is a protein and that a polypeptide chain can act as a catalyst in the facilitation of a chemical reaction.

Sumner’s proof was an important milestone along the road to understanding the chemical basis of cell function (1526).

 

John Jacob Abel (US) crystallized insulin (3).

 

Anna L. Sommer (US) and Charles B. Lipman (US) experimentally demonstrated the essential nature of zinc, copper, and boron for plant growth (1472; 1473).

 

Alfred Henry Sturtevant (US) found that inversion of a section of the third chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster reduces crossover frequency (1523).

 

Hugo W. Alberts (US) devised a method for calculating genetic linkage values (15).

Calvin Blackman Bridges (US) and Tomasz M. Olbrycht (PL) noted that to accurately construct genetic maps it is necessary to know the full number of crossovers (doubles counting as two crossovers, triples as three crossovers) that occur between the loci that are to be mapped. In constructing such maps, it is first necessary to determine experimentally the amounts by which the various crossing over values exceed the directly observed recombination percents. The experimental determination of the amount by which crossing over exceeds recombination is made through use of loci lying between the two loci in question. Bridges created the sc ec ct v g f multiple recessive and called it "Xple" (X-chromosome multiple). This organism was used to test many aspects of linkage mapping (172).

 

Edgar Altenburg (US) and Hermann J. Muller (US) demonstrated the nature of the mechanism of inheritance of the truncate character in Drosophila. They showed that it conformed regularly to the principles of chromosome heredity, factor constancy, etc., and disclosed the causes of the inconstancy of the inbred stock, and of the indefiniteness and variability of the ratios thrown in crosses. The truncate character, when it was analyzed, was found to depend on so many factors. 1) Two successive mutations were practically necessary, in the first place, before truncate became visible at all. 2) Since truncate depended on a lethal, and was, in addition, inconstant in somatic expression, it was subjected to selection, which perpetuated any new factors (balancing lethals and intensifiers) that still further differentiated truncate from normal. 3) Since the truncate character depended on an unstable developmental reaction, the initial appearance of such intensifiers was made more likely (32).

 

Edgar Douglas Adrian (GB) and Yngve Zotterman (SE), using the afferent nerve of a stretch receptor in a frog muscle, showed that it is possible by amplification to record the impulses in single nerve cells to a natural stimulus (tension). They postulated the concept of adaptation of receptors to stimuli and predicted that other units of the nervous system would also exhibit adaptation (10).

Edgar Douglas Adrian (GB) and Yngve Zotterman (SE), established beyond doubt that the nerve impulse is invariant, that the intensity of sensation is conveyed by the frequency of impulses and the quality by the type of nerve fiber in action (10).

 

Eugene Markley Landis (US), Schack August Steenberg Krogh (DK), and Abbey H. Turner (US), in an elegant series of experiments, determined that the rate of net fluid movement across the capillary wall is proportional to the difference between capillary hydrostatic pressure and the osmotic pressure of the plasma proteins, thus providing the first experimental proof of Ernest Starling’s hypothesis of fluid exchange. Landis’s constant of proportionality was the first quantitative measurement of the hydrodynamic conductance of the capillary wall (cubic microns of fluid per second per centimeter water pressure difference per square micrometer of capillary wall). These papers included the first measurements of the pressure drops along the vascular tree and localization of the separate components of the peripheral resistance to blood flow, in mammals as well as frogs (897; 916-928). See, Starling 1896.

 

John Belling (GB-US) perfected the aceto-carmine staining method by adding iron. This technique was especially important because it allowed a clear differentiation between chromosomes and cytoplasm (109).

 

Walter Bradford Cannon (US) coined the word homeostasis: the maintenance of balance in the body’s state via chemical feedback mechanisms (224; 225). See, Claude Bernard (FR) for his concept called milieu intérieur, 1865. See, Alcmaèon (GR) for his concept called isonomy, 520 BCE

 

Gaston Ramon (FR) and Pierre A. Descombey (FR) described the flocculation reaction and observed that flocculation may occur in zones that do not correspond to the point at which the toxin and antitoxin neutralize each other (1267).

 

Kenjiró Fujii (JP) observed the coiled structure of the chromosome for the first time noting that in certain stages of the cell cycle, two filaments appeared to be coiled around one another (572).

 

Frantisek Vejdovsky (CZ) showed that nuclear fission in an ovule is preceded by the splitting of the centrosome (which he called the periplast); he was apparently the first to observe the centriole in 1866 (1616).

 

Félix Hubert d’Herelle (CA) described the three-step process for the life history of the bacteriophage virus: (1) attachment to the susceptible bacterium, (2) multiplication in the cell, and (3) disintegration of the cell to set free the progeny virus particles and attachment of the progeny to other susceptible bacteria, if such are present. These conclusions were based on the plaque-count, and dilution methods of assay that he had invented (342).

 

Louis Otto Kunkel (US) demonstrated that Cicadula sexnotata (a leafhopper) could act as a vector of aster yellows virus (909).

 

Thomas Clifford Vanterpool (CA) was the first to discover that mixed infections, the simultaneous occurrence of two viruses within a host plant acting together, could produce a distinct severe disease. He showed that tomato mosaic virus and potato mosaic virus acting together caused the severe disease of tomatoes called streak or winter blight while either virus acting alone was shown to cause mild symptoms (1614).

 

Andre Paillot (FR) discovered granulosis virus (GV) infection in an insect, Pieris brassicae (cabbage butterfly). He was the first to describe a new group of diseases, the granuloses, which are characterized by the formation of virus inclusion bodies called granules within tissues of infected insects (1198). These are now considered Baculovirus.

 

Frederik Kraneveld (NL) and Thomas M. Doyle (GB) discovered Newcastle disease virus (425; 876). Note: first paramyxovirus

 

William Edwin Cotton (US), Peter K. Olitsky (US), Jacob Traum (US), and Harry W. Schoening (US) discovered vesicular stomatitis viruses (320; 1192).

 

Patrick Playfair Laidlaw (GB) and George William Dunkin (GB) established the viral etiology of canine distemper (915).

 

Edson Sunderland Bastin (US) succeeded in culturing sulfate-reducing bacteria from groundwater samples extracted from an oil deposit that was hundreds of meters below the surface. Since this discovery over 9,000 strains of bacteria and fungi have been isolated from diverse subsurface environments (88; 548).

 

Heinrich Bernward Prell (DE) reported an amoebic infection of an insect, Apis mellifera Linn. (honeybee). The etiological agent he described and named Malpighamoeba mellificae attacks the Malpighian tubules causing a dysentery (1251; 1252).

 

Walter H. Burkholder (US) observed that halo blight of beans is caused by Pseudomonas phaseolicola (194).

 

Everitt George Dunne Murray (CA), Robert Alexander Webb (GB), and Meredith Blake Robson Swann (GB) isolated and characterized Listeria monocytogenes as the etiological agent of an epizootic among laboratory rabbits and guinea pigs, which was characterized in part by monocytosis (1154).

Walter F. Schlech III (US), Pierre M. Lavigne (US), Robert A. Bortolussi (US), Alexander C. Allen (US), E. Vanora Haldane (US), A. John Wort (US), Allen W. Hightower (US), Scott E. Johnson (US), Stanley H. King (US), Eric S. Nicholls (US), and Clare V. Broome (US) established that human consumption of Listeria-contaminated foodstuffs causes a disease called listeriosis (1364).

 

Louis Edmond den Dooren de Jong (NL) demonstrated that a strain of Pseudomonas putida can proliferate on a mineral medium to which any one of some eighty compounds was added as the sole organic substance available (374).

 

Maurice Lemoigne (FR) originally discovered poly-beta-hydroxybutyric acid (PHB) as a major component of the cells of the bacterium Bacillus megaterium (957).

Frederick P. Delafield (US), Michael Doudoroff (US), Norberto J. Palleroni (US), Carol Jean Lusty (US) and Rebecca Contopoulos (US) later honored Lemoigne by naming Pseudomonas lemoigne, an active oxidizer of extracellular PHB, for him (382).

 

Frank W. Tilley (US) and Jacob M. Schaffer (US) determined that the germicidal activity of the aliphatic alcohols increases regularly from methyl through octyl alcohol for each additional methyl group in the straight chain (1361; 1563).

 

Samuel Ottmar Mast (US) proposed the tail contraction model to explain sol-gel amoeboid movement (1056).

 

John Nathaniel Couch (US) described for the first time the existence of physiologically distinct and separate male and female strains in an oomycete (Dictyuchus) (321).

 

Friedrich Seidel (DE), using eggs of the dragonfly, Platycnemis pennipes, determined that embryonic development in insects is typified by the presence of a special kind of germ-band formation. Because of the distribution of cytoplasm and yolk in the egg the germ band is limited to a particular region. The ventral portion of the developing embryo is special because it is the carrier of the main system of organs. The ventral part of the embryo precedes the dorsal side in development (1386-1388).

 

Alden B. Dawson (US) carried out the first successful skeletal staining when he used alizarin red S (370).

 

Henry Allan Gleason (US) argued that every plant association is the unique product of the fluctuating environmental conditions of a particular time and place (610).

 

Gavin Rylands de Beer (GB) observed that certain cartilage and bone cells are derived from the outer ectodermal layer of the embryo; calling into question the germ-layer theory (372).

 

Lloyd R. Watson (US) devised instrumental methods to artificially inseminate the honeybee (221; 1710; 1711). This instrument greatly improved genetics of the honeybee.

 

Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov (RU) concluded that populations in nature maintain within themselves the variants, which arise within them by mutation. This would provide them with a supply of potential but hidden variability out of which the adaptiveness of the population to a changing environment could arise (251; 252). Note: Together with Ronald Aylmer Fisher, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, and Sewall Green Wright, Chetverikov is now regarded as one of the founders of population genetics and modern evolutionary theory.

 

William Bloom (US) worked out the early stages of the embryogenesis of human bile capillaries (142).

 

William Bloom (US) described the transformation of small lymphocytes into myelocytes in germinal centers (143).

 

George Ellett Coghill (US), in his studies of the amphibian Amblystoma punctatum, established that innervation develops in a cephalo-caudal (head-tail) direction, and that limb movements emerge from a more general pattern of trunk movement. He then theorized that behavior develops as the expansion of a "total pattern," rather than simply as the combination or coordination of reflexes and suggested strongly that this might well be true for higher vertebrates, including man (282-285).

 

Serguei Metalnikov (RU-FR) and Victor Chorine (FR) provided an important paper in psychoneuroimmunology when they adapted Pavlov’s procedures of stimulant conditioning to activate and enhance cellular and antibody immune responses to foreign substances, particularly to otherwise lethal doses of cholera and anthrax bacteria (1093).

 

Ralph Milton Waters (US) authored a landmark article on carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption in anesthesiology (1707).

 

Karl Ernest Mason (US), working with the rat, was the first to associate testicular degeneration and hence male infertility with vitamin E deficiency (1054).

Harold S. Olcott (US) and Henry A. Mattill (US) fractionated the oil of lettuce and found that one fraction had high antioxidant power and high potency as a source of vitamin E (1190).

Herbert McLean Evans (US), Oliver H. Emerson (US), and Gladys A. Emerson (US) isolated alpha-tocopherol from wheat germ oil and discovered that it is synonymous with vitamin E (482).

Erhard Robert Fernholz (US) determined the structure of alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) (510).

Paul Karrer (RU-CH), Hans Heinrich Fritzsche (CH), Beat Heinrich Ringier (CH), and H. Salomon (CH) synthesized alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) and proved its biological role as a vitamin (819).

 

Wells Phillips Eagleton (US) described cavernous sinus thrombophlebitis in relation to septicemia (433).

 

Giovanni Di Guglielmo (IT) described a syndrome of unknown origin characterized by enormous numbers of nucleated erythrocytes appearing in the bone marrow and blood (acute erythroblastosis) (394).

 

Erik Adolf Willebrand (FI) described a previously unknown form of hemophilia with a prolonged bleeding time course as its most prominent sign. He named it pseudo-hemophilia (1652; 1753; 1754). Note: Later called Willebrand’s disease I

 

Nikolai Mikhailovich Itsenko (RU) described glucocorticoid excess syndrome in which the hypersecretion of glucocorticoids is secondary to hypersecretion of adrenocorticotrophic hormone from the pituitary. It may also be caused by a basophilic adenoma of the pituitary (777).

Harvey Williams Cushing (US) described this syndrome six years later (339). It is often called Cushing’s syndrome I but should be called Itsenko-Cushing syndrome.

 

Felix Mandl (AT) was the first to undertake parathyroid surgery, successfully removing a parathyroid adenoma in a patient with osteitis fibrosa cystica (1027).

 

Henry Head (GB) presented his theory of aphasia as a condition with, “a disorder of symbolic formulation and expression” (704).

 

César Roux (CH) performed the first surgical resection of a pheochromocytoma, in 1926 (1028). Later the same year, Charles Horace Mayo (US) performed the first surgical resection in the United States and described medical and surgical management of pheochromocytoma (1063).

 

Percival Bailey (US) and Harvey Williams Cushing (US) wrote a book, which formed the basis of modern day neurooncology. It completely revolutionized the understanding of neurooncology, and for first time the neurosurgical community was presented with an orderly classification of gliomas based on the tumor's natural history and clinical course. This work changed antiquated thinking by showing that the microscopic structure of a tumor is important for prognosis. It completely revamped the understanding of these tumors. In fact, the histopathological basis of brain tumors in relation to patient survival rate and outcome still influences present-day neurosurgical thought (73).

Percival Bailey (US) simplified, refined, and made the concepts presented in the 1926 book more practical (68; 69).

 

Harvey Williams Cushing (US) and William T. Bovie (US) conceived and introduced electrosurgery, which allowed the cutting of tissue with almost no bleeding. During 1927, Cushing removed a number of brain tumors previously considered inoperable (341; 1293).

Maximilian Carl-Friedrich Nitze (DE), in 1896, developed an operating cystoscope fitted with an electric cautery (1176).

 

Francis Bertody Sumner (US) made a thorough study of coat color among the mainland and Santa Rosa Island mice and concluded that both isolation and natural selection probably operated in the origin of species, but that environmental mechanisms could not be ruled out. Though still not conclusive, Sumner’s reading of nature’s experiments on Santa Rosa came closer than any other study at the time — field or lab — to providing empirical evidence of the mechanism of evolution. Santa Rosa is an island off the Florida panhandle (1526).

 

Knud Haraldsen Krabbe (DK) founded the journal Acta Psychiatrica et Neurologica Scandinavica.

 

1927

Heinrich Otto Wieland (DE) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations of the constitution of the bile acids and related substances.

 

Julius Wagner-Jauregg (AT) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of fever therapy for paresis (dementia paralytica). He shared the honor with the pathologist Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger (DK), who was awarded the prize "for his discovery of the Spiroptery carcinoma."

 

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaitre (BE) proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. He visualized a primal atom, an incredibly dense egg containing all the material for the universe within a sphere about 30 times larger than the Sun. This primal atom exploded some 20-60 Ga scattering matter and energy in all direction (955; 956). This theory is now known popularly as the Big Bang Theory, a phrase coined by Fred Hoyle (GB) in a moment of facetiousness, during a radio broadcast (762). Note: Alexander Friedmann (RU) proposed an expanding universe as early as 1922 (108). Note: Today, most physicists and cosmologists conceive of the primal atom as having been smaller than Lemaitre's!

 

Alexander Logie du Toit (ZA) compared the geology of South America and South Africa and found them to be similar in many ways (428).

 

Hans Busch (DE) theorized that magnetic fields could act as lenses by focusing electron beams to a point (211). This was vital to the invention of the electron microscope.

 

Hermann Joseph Muller, Jr. (US) and Lewis John Stadler (US) discovered that x-rays induce mutations in animals and plants respectively. They found that the dose-frequency curve is linear (1150; 1483; 1484). Note: here there is emplied that somatic mutations initiate cancer

 

Albert Charles Chibnall (GB) and Harold John Channon (GB) discovered the exact structure of phosphatidic acid; described for the first time in living materials (255).

 

Otto Knut Olof Folin (SE-US) and Vintila Ciocalteu (RO) designed the Folin-Ciocalteu reagent to detect phenolic and antioxidant polyphenols (536). Note: This work used the now famous Folin-Ciocalteu reagent.

 

Rudolph John Anderson (SE-US) isolated the various lipoid and carbohydrate fractions from the tubercle bacillus. He was able to separate the lipoid constituents of tubercle bacilli into three groups consisting of wax, glycerides, and phosphatides (39).

Rudolph John Anderson (SE-US) described the constitution of phthiocol, a fat-soluble pigment he isolated from human tubercle bacillus. He determined that this previously unknown substance was in fact 2-methyl-3-hydroxy-1, 4-naphthaquinone (41).

 

Otto Fritz Meyerhof (DE-US) discovered that the first step in the fermentation of glucose (glucose → glucose-6-phosphate), catalyzed by an enzyme he called hexokinase, does not require inorganic phosphate but rather organic phosphate transferred from its terminal, or g position on adenosine triphosphate (ATP) (1098).

Otto Fritz Meyerhof (DE-US) and Fritz Albert Lipmann (DE-US) discovered that sodium fluoride strongly inhibits the fermentation and phosphorylation of hexoses (985; 1098).

Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin (DE-SE), Erich Adler (), Otto Fritz Meyerhof (DE-US), Sidney P. Colowick (US), and Herman Moritz Kalckar (DK-US) partially purified hexokinase then established the reaction which it catalyzes as: glucose + adenosine triphosphate (ATP) à glucose 6-phosphate + adenosine diphosphate (ADP) (293; 1101; 1634)

 

Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin (DE-SE) ws the first to show that the combination between an enzyme and a substrate can be traced back to a certain atomic group. He was experimenting with dipeptidases in which a carbonyl group is the site of combination (1632; 1633).

 

Otto Paul Hermann Diels (DE), Willy Gädke (DE), and Anna Karstens (DE) used selenium to dehydrogenate cholesterol thus yielding Diels’ hydrocarbon, an aromatic hydrocarbon closely related to the skeletal structure of all steroids, of which cholesterol is one (399; 400).

Otto Paul Hermann Diels (DE) and Hermann Klare (DE), in 1934, put forth the correct structure of Diels’ hydrocarbon as 3'-methyl-1, 2-cyclopentaphenanthrene. This work represents a dramatic turning point in the understanding of the chemistry of cholesterol and other steroids.

 

Juda Hirsch Quastel (GB-CA) and Walter Reginald Wooldridge (GB) studied dehydrogenases from Escherichia coli and further developed the concept of the active center, or site of activation, a term earlier coined by Quastel (1926). This work stressed the importance of using in vitro results to understand in vivo activities of enzymes (1259). They also discovered that malonic acid is a powerful inhibitor of succinic dehydrogenase (1260).

 

Philip Eggleton (GB) and Marion Grace Palmer Eggleton (GB) found an organic acid-labile phosphate in muscle tissue. They named it phosphagen (phosphocreatine) and established the fact that muscular contraction is accompanied by removal of phosphagen, and subsequent recovery in oxygen is characterized by a rapid restitution of the phosphagen—a phase of recovery apparently independent of the relatively slow oxidative removal of lactic acid (450).

Cyrus Hartwell Fiske (US) and Yellapragada SubbaRow (IN-US) discovered the chemical nature of the phosphagen (phosphocreatine) present in muscles. They announced that voluntary muscle contains an unstable compound of creatine and phosphoric acid, which is hydrolyzed by stimulation, and resynthesized when the muscle is permitted to recover. They proposed a structure and pointed out some of the physiological properties of phosphocreatine (later changed to creatine phosphate) (529; 530; 532). Note: Michel-Eugène Chevreul (FR), in 1832, determined that muscle contains creatine (254).

 

Bernhard Zondek (DE-IL) and Selmar Aschheim (DE) isolated estrogenic hormone from the urine of pregnant women in amounts averaging 12,000 mouse units per liter