50, 100 and 150 Years Ago: Viral Pattern, Breathing Machines and Science and Guilt

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FEBRUARY 1957
THE INFLUENZA VIRUS--"The virus particle has a relatively simple structure which we may hope to understand fairly well. The normal living cell is something of which our knowledge is both enormously extensive and utterly incomplete. The infected cell presents us with a far more complex problem. It is perhaps characteristic of the growing edge of biology that when a new phenomenon like virus multiplication comes to be studied, almost all the knowledge of cellular chemistry and function gained from other types of study turns out to be irrelevant. Any attempt to picture what is happening in the infected cell must necessarily therefore be provisional and oversimplified. A virus is not an individual organism in the ordinary sense of the term but something which could almost be called a stream of biological pattern. The pattern is carried from cell to cell by the relatively inert virus particles, but it takes on a new borrowed life from its host at each infection.--Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet" [Editors' note: Burnet won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960.]

FEBRUARY 1907
FRESH AIR--"Smoke helmets, smoke jackets, and self-contained breathing apparatus generally are used in mines of all kinds, fire brigades, ammonia chambers of refrigerating factories, and other industrial concerns. The curious gear is intended to supply the user with factitious but perfectly respirable air, for about four hours at a stretch. Oxygen can be supplied from a steel cylinder. The question of renewing the oxygen is often a serious one, say in the remote mining districts of South America. Some shipping companies absolutely refuse to carry compressed oxygen in steel cylinders; but now a new substance, known as 'oxylithe,' has come along. The stuff is prepared in small cakes ready for immediate use, and on coming in contact with water it gives off chemically pure oxygen."

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