Portal:History of science

The history of virology – the scientific study of viruses and the infections they cause – began in the closing years of the 19th century. Although Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur developed the first vaccines to protect against viral infections, they did not know that viruses existed. The first evidence of the existence of viruses came from experiments with filters that had pores small enough to retain bacteria. In 1892, Dmitri Ivanovsky used one of these filters to show that sap from a diseased tobacco plant remained infectious to healthy tobacco plants despite having been filtered. Martinus Beijerinck called the filtered, infectious substance a "virus" and this discovery is considered to be the beginning of virology.

The subsequent discovery and partial characterization of bacteriophages by Frederick Twort and Félix d'Herelle further catalyzed the field, and by the early 20th century many viruses had been discovered. In 1926, Thomas Milton Rivers defined viruses as obligate parasites. Viruses were demonstrated to be particles, rather than a fluid, by Wendell Meredith Stanley, and the invention of the electron microscope in 1931 allowed their complex structures to be visualised. (Full article...)

1675 image of a Chinese astronomer with an elaborate armillary sphere. In the 17th century, Chinese astronomers collaborated extensively with Jesuit scholars, who brought the Copernican and Tychonic systems from Europe.

...that the history of biochemistry spans approximately 400 years, but the word "biochemistry" in the modern sense was first proposed only in 1903, by German chemist Carl Neuberg?

...that the Great Comet of 1577 was viewed by people all over Europe, including famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and the six year old Johannes Kepler?

...that the Society for Social Studies of Science (often abbreviated as 4S) is, as its website claims, "the oldest and largest scholarly association devoted to understanding science and technology"?

McClintock in her laboratory, 1947

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She is often erroneously credited with producing the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposons and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. (Full article...)

• 1660 - Birth of Hubert Gautier, French scientist and civil engineer (d. 1737)

• 1665 - Birth of Giacomo F. Maraldi, French-Italian astronomer (d. 1729)

• 1789 - Birth of Augustin-Louis Cauchy, French mathematician (d. 1857)

• 1813 - Birth of Jean Stas, Belgian chemist (d. 1891)

• 1814 - Death of Benjamin Thompson, American physicist and inventor (b. 1753)

• 1816 - Birth of Charles Frédéric Gerhardt, French chemist (d. 1856)

• 1826 - Birth of Carl Gegenbaur, German anatomist (d. 1903)

• 1836 - Death of Claude-Louis Navier, French physicist (b. 1785)

• 1888 - The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs

• 1909 - Birth of Nikolay Bogolyubov, Russian mathematician (d. 1992)

• 1951 - Birth of Eric Goles, Chilean mathematician and computer scientist

• 1957 - Death of Harald Ulrik Sverdrup, Norwegian meteorologist and oceanographer (b. 1888)

• 1995 - Death of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian-born astrophysicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1910)