A few days ago, the UK postal service issued a new series of stamps featuring 10 eminent scientists to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The image above shows two of the stamps, depicting Edward Jennner (1749-1823) and Joseph Lister (1827-1912) -- who are considered the 'fathers' of vaccination and antiseptic surgery, respectively. They both had a rough time trying to convince their fellow physicians to accept their proposed methods as good and useful practices. But they eventually succeeded, and millions of lives were saved.

It is noteworthy that Jenner was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1789 thanks to his research on cuckoos (the birds, not the clocks). He was a 'natural scientist' and studied a variety of issues ranging from fossils to animal behaviour, and from balloons to medicine. It was in 1796 when he carried out his famous experiments, showing that people could be protected against the deadly smallpox by inoculating them with cowpox (a mild, related disease). Although the basic rationale behind Jenner's technique was not novel (but this was not the reason why the Royal Society rejected his original report!), his careful studies and his tenacity were fundamental for a wide progressive adoption of vaccination. Now --two centuries later-- the world can celebrate the 30th anniversary of smallpox eradication. This deserves a stamp or two, doesn't it?

Now, let's turn our look to Joseph Lister. He introduced phenol (carbolic acid) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds. As a result, post-operative infections were greatly reduced, and many lives (and body parts that otherwise would be amputated) were saved. Because of these achievements, Lister was not only elected fellow but president of the Royal Society (between 1895 and 1900), and his name was given to a bacterium ...and a mouthwash (what an honour!).

Anyway, it seems that there was some kind of infectious hunger for 'small knowledge' at the Listers' house, as Joseph was not the only one interested in the microscopic world. His father, Joseph Jackson Lister (1786-1869), made crucial advances toward correcting image aberrations in microscopes (and he was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1832). After his work, the improved microscopes became powerful instruments, allowing more detailed observations of specimens and, hence, the birth of modern histology.

Now this may not come as a surprise to you, but (at least) two other members of the family were also elected fellows of the Royal Society. They were Arthur Lister (1830-1908, Joseph's brother) and Gulielma Lister (1860-1949, Arthur's daughter). Arthur and Gulielma became renowned botanists and mycologists, and world experts in mycetozoa (myxomycetes, slime molds). I'm wondering if they started by playing with J.J.'s old microscope? Gulielma's achievements are especially remarkable in a time (early 1900's) when very very few women were allowed to excel in science: she was a founding member of the British Mycological Society (and president in two occasions), as well as fellow, council member and vice-president of the Linnaean Society. Does anybody know of a stamp featuring Gulielma? Probably not (yet) but this could be a good topic for the next International Women's Day...

Further reading:

Stamps commemorating the Royal Society anniversary:
- Getting the Royal Society stamp of approval by Charlotte King. New Scientist, 25 Feb 2010. It includes large-size images of the 10 stamps.
- The Royal Society 350 Years, British Postal Museum & Archive.
- Science stamps mark the Royal Society's 350th anniversary, Royal Society, 24 Feb 2010.
- 350th Anniversary of the Royal Society, new Great Britain stamps, Norvic Philatelics. Includes interesting technical details and image credits, and a few special postmarks.

Edward Jenner and smallpox:
- Edward Jenner Museum, Gloucestershire, UK. Excellent website with plenty of information.
- Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination by Stefan Riedel, Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent) (2005) 18, 21–25.
- Edward Jenner (1749-1823), historical figures, BBC.
- Smallpox, World Health Organization.

Joseph Lister and his relatives:
- Joseph Lister: Surgery Transformed, a video produced by British Medical Journal Media.
- Joseph Jackson Lister (1786-1869), Pioneers in Optics. Science Optics & You, Molecular Expressions.
- Early Myxomycetologists (including Arthur and Gulielma Lister), Myxoweb.
- Gulielma Lister (1860-1949), biography, Wanstead Wildlife.
- Biography of Gulielma Lister (1860-1949), The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L-Z. By Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Joy Dorothy Harvey.

Microbiology (and other sciences) featured on stamps:
- Microscopy on stamps by Dave Walker, Microscopy-UK. Great article, together with the following one:
- Photomicrography on stamps by Dave Walker, Microscopy-UK.
- Physics-related stamps, compiled by Joachim Reinhardt. Mostly about physicists, but there are also a few other scientists, mathematicians and engineers (including Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke).
- Science and Technology on Stamps, A to Zee ("the web guide for collectors").
- Sci-Philately: a Selective History of Science on Stamps by Maiken Naylor, University at Buffalo Libraries.
- Medical Stamps, Scientific-web.com
- Filatelia Médica - Medical Stamps by Dr Tuoto.
- Pasteur on Stamps by Dr Tuoto.
- AIDS on Stamps.
- Malaria on Stamps Collection.
- Collect GB Stamps, resources for collecting British stamps. It has a good search tool.

 

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Heritage Key are holding a competition, asking for blog posts about “Which invaders have had the biggest impact on London?” I can’t enter for various reasons, but it’s an interesting question. In the spirit of creatively coming up with the wrong answer, I’m going to go for:

Y. pestis is without doubt the invader who has had the biggest impact, for certain definitions of invader and impact. I think it’s an invader, because it’s thought to have come from the Gobi desert originally. It’s certainly had impact, because no other invader has come close to killing half of London’s population. If you’re wondering which invader killed so many people, it’s thought that Y. pestis in one form or another was the bacterium that caused the Black Death.

It arrived in the UK in 1348. One record is the Grey Friars Chronicle, which has the best description:

In this year 1348 in Melcombe, in the county of Dorset, a little before the feast of St. John the Baptist, two ships, one of them from Bristol came alongside. One of the sailors had brought with him from Gascony the seeds of the terrible pestilence and through him the men of that town of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected.

In reality it probably came in on several ships from across the channel. News of the plague spread much faster than the plague itself, so Gloucester was able to prepare by shutting the gates of the city. As a plan this would have worked if the rats had been trained to enter the city by the commercial routes. For somewhere like London this was not a remotely plausible strategy, and so the population would have been awaiting what seemed like the judgement of a wrathful god. It arrived in London by autumn of the same year, almost certainly aboard a ship rather than from an overland route.

If you were a killer bug with a penchant for pestilence then 1300s London would have been paradise. Hitching a ride in the gut of a flea, you could have transferred to a human or one of the many millions of rats which thrived in the squalor of the city. The hygiene practices of the time, and I use the word hygiene wholly incorrectly, meant that there was a plentiful supply of fresh rats to incubate a travelling plague. It gave the disease a tremendous longevity, in sad contrast to its many victims. If you measure impact purely in terms of people dead, then it’s hard to find anything with greater impact than Y. pestis, which hung around till 1665. Yet it’s not just death that made Y. pestis London’s greatest invader.

Across Britain a third of the population died. The landscape is littered with what archaeologists call DMVs, Deserted Medieval Villages. You can still see them around today with the occasional church in the middle of nowhere, with no obvious congregation. You can’t remove that many people without something breaking, and in the Middle Ages, this was Feudalism. Before the plague serfs had been tied to their master’s estates. The massive culling of the population by the Black Death increased the value of labourers, and set in motion a series of revolts and uprisings which would eventually end Feudalism.

Another effect was the abandonment of land. This helped place more wealth in hands of the church. This wealth helped fuel the conflicts between church and state in later times. More controversially, it’s also been proposed that agricultural use of land could have affected the climate. Bill Ruddiman has argued that the plague led to reforestation of the land, reducing the carbon concentration of the atmosphere, ultimately leading to cooling in the Little Ice Age. This is not a mainstream idea, but it is taken seriously by many climate researchers and does appear in climate change journals, rather than social sciences journals.

Regardless of the climactic consequences, it’s interesting to ask if the Renaissance would have happened without the Black Death. Some of the social changes were happening before the arrival of the plague, but at the very least Y. pestis amplified them. The removal of so many people from the population wasn’t just a quantative change, it was a qualitative change, because it meant rethinking how people were valued in an economy. The Black Death fuelled social changes in the Late Middle Ages which would eventually blossom as the Renaissance. Still, this is one historical character who might not stay in the past. Y. pestis may yet have a role to play in the future.

If you’re interested in reading more about the arrival of the Black Death as an invasion, there’s a very readable chapter in Benedictow’s book The Black Death, 1346-1353: the complete history available in Google Books.

 

One of the most important procedures in virology is measuring the virus titer – the concentration of viruses in a sample. A widely used approach for determining the quantity of infectious virus is the plaque assay. In this technique, the spread of progeny viruses released by individually infected cells is restricted to neighboring cells by a semisolid medium. Consequently, each infectious particle produces a circular zone of infected cells called a plaque. By imagining live, virus-infected cells using a microscope, beautiful movies have been made which show how a plaque develops in real time.

To produce the movies, cells were infected with vaccinia virus, covered with a semi-solid medium, and placed in an incubator. The monolayers were examined periodically until a small plaque became visible. The infected cells were then placed on an inverted microscope fitted with a camera. Images of the plaque were taken every hour for 12-19 hours and assembled into a movie.

The first movie shows plaque formation on monkey cells infected with vaccinia virus. The virus infection begins at a small focus in the center, then spreads radially outwards. As the infection spreads, the cells undergo changes know as cytopathic effect. The large circle of dead cells would appear as a plaque if the monolayer were stained.

 

The second movie, made at higher magnification, shows spread at the edge of a viral plaque. The vaccinia virus used for this experiment carries the gene encoding enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP). Hence the infected cells fluoresce green as viral replication proceeds.

 

By showing very clearly how a viral plaque develops, these movies will be an invaluable teaching resource for years to come. I am grateful to the authors of this study for providing an up-close view of a technique that animal virologists have been using since 1952.

Doceul, V., Hollinshead, M., van der Linden, L., & Smith, G. (2010). Repulsion of Superinfecting Virions: A Mechanism for Rapid Virus Spread Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1183173

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Lessons from a pandemic

Nature 463, 135 (2010). doi:10.1038/463135b

It is time to assess what worked, and what didn't, in the global efforts to cope with swine flu.

The world's response to the H1N1 flu pandemic over the past ten months suggests that the lessons learned from dealing with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the threat of H5N1 avian flu have paid off. Researchers worldwide freely shared and published data covering the genetics, virology and epidemiology of the H1N1 virus in almost real time. Most national and international health agencies reacted swiftly and generally communicated openly with the media and the public. But the response also revealed serious weaknesses. The sobering fact is that humans were lucky with this pandemic. Most cases have been mild, yet health services were still often stretched to capacity. And the fact that vaccines were too few, too late, would have been catastrophic if the virus had been more lethal.

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