35
votes
Accepted
Has there even been a clinical study where healthy volunteers consented to be infected with a pathogen?
This is a great biological question! It asks a lot about how empirical science is done in the field of modern biology. I'm glad we encourage such questions from curious people who want to learn more.
...
- 5,558
24
votes
Accepted
ECG wave names origin
Interesting question! I searched briefly and came up with an answer from this short paper.
I won't repeat all the details of the paper, but to be not a completely link-only answer I will give a brief ...
- 41.2k
20
votes
Accepted
Why aren't 'exons' named 'introns'?
The terms intron and exon were coined by Walter Gilbert in a renowned 'News and Views' article, Why Genes in Pieces, published in the journal Nature in 1978.
Introns are the intragenic regions and ...
- 4,668
19
votes
Accepted
What is the evidence that plants and animals had a common ancestor?
Darwin did propose that all extant organisms have a common ancestor:
Therefore, on the principle of natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible that, from some such ...
- 14.2k
18
votes
Accepted
Darwin's first sketch of a phylogenetic tree
This is from Darwin's Notebook B: Transmutation of species from 1837–1838. From what I understand, the tree is a hypothetical depiction of descent used to discuss differences and relatedness between ...
- 16.6k
18
votes
Has there even been a clinical study where healthy volunteers consented to be infected with a pathogen?
Yes, Dr Barry Marshall self administered Helicobacter pylori to investigate whether it causes stomach ulcers. He won a Nobel Prize for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
- 2,836
14
votes
Accepted
Restriction enzymes, how are the recognition sequences determined?
This paper describes a simple method to determine restriction sites, which was used to determine the restriction sequence of the previously uncharacterised enzyme from Haemophilus gallinarum.
In ...
- 9,434
14
votes
Who are these biologists?
Front row, left to right; Victor McKusick, Maurice Wilkins, James Watson, Walter Gilbert and John Kendrew.
- 1,836
13
votes
When did mouth pipetting stop becoming a way to handle liquids in a lab?
Mouth pipetting, while almost unheard of in modern laboratories in developed countries, is still very much a current protocol in many parts of the world.
For example, this paper analyses the ...
- 9,434
13
votes
Accepted
How to decipher references in natural history works of the late Renaissance and early Modernity?
I have found what may be the holy grail. It is a book known as "A Botanical Materia Medica" by Jonathan Stokes. This has several volumes, but the one you want is volume 1, which has no ...
- 9,363
11
votes
Accepted
Was Darwin aware of the difficulties behind the concept of species?
The whole point of Darwin's theory was that transition from one species to another is extremely slow and gradual. There are plenty of quotes in "Origin of Species" stating this, and also affirming ...
- 421
11
votes
Has there even been a clinical study where healthy volunteers consented to be infected with a pathogen?
All the time!
For example Flucamp does research on influenza, rhinovirus and (non-SARS) coronaviruses, that involves deliberate infection of paid volunteers.
When the trial starts, we only ...
- 298
10
votes
Who created the codon wheel chart (not as a table)?
I am Rosemarie Swanson, still alive, and yes, the Gray code representation of the codon wheel was my idea. I was trying to develop a linear similarity scale for amino acids. On Thanksgiving of 1977,...
9
votes
Accepted
Before Evolution was proposed by Charles Darwin, what were the leading secular theories to explain how life developed?
There were many (more or less) non-theological theories of how life had developed before Darwin, starting at the ancient greeks. Many theories included spontaneous generation but also aspects of ...
- 16.6k
9
votes
Accepted
Why do we use an autoclave at 121°C (250F)? (Origin)
The reason for 121°C and not 120°C is due to how autoclaves work and how they were developed. They sterilize with saturated steam under pressure. Historically, we measure the pressure generated by ...
- 196
9
votes
Accepted
Why were there relatively fewer papers about cell fusion before the 1950s?
Since you need to be able to grow cells for studying their interactions, I think the main reason for this is the development of cell culture techniques in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As an example ...
- 51.2k
8
votes
Accepted
What were the camels' humps good for back in the polar areas?
In my opinion there might be two reasons why the camel hump (rather than bump) might be one of the adequate adaptations of camels to living in the cold (additional to their flat feet giving hold on ...
- 2,878
8
votes
What was the first piece of work in computational biology?
I don't believe you'll ever find the first work in bioinformatics (or computational biology, as you put it), however the field really began in the times of accumulating data about protein biochemistry....
- 160
8
votes
Accepted
What was the first piece of work in computational biology?
Another nomination, if you include infectious disease epidemiology as part of biology and hence computational simulations of epidemics as part of computational biology:
Measles periodicity and ...
- 5,274
8
votes
Accepted
What is a microsome?
The first quote is correct. 'Microsome' is more of a lab term. This is because, as said they are found (re-formed) after centrifugation and as such aren't seen in an intact cell. Differential ...
- 3,657
8
votes
Who created the codon wheel chart (not as a table)?
It is very difficult to answer this one for certain but I think the codon wheel representation is sometimes attributed to Rosemarie Swanson who represented the amino acid code using Gray code (or ...
- 1,509
7
votes
Accepted
Graph of new species discovered per year
Here is an answer; as I'll explain, it's not getting the same numbers you quoted above (that could be a deep methodological rabbit hole), but it gives a reasonable answer.
I started from the data at ...
- 5,274
6
votes
Accepted
When was it discovered XY chromosomes decide the sex of a child in humans?
The discovery of genetic sex determination, and determination of sex via male gametes (in XY species, female in ZW), occurred over some time in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Advances were made ...
- 16.1k
6
votes
ECG wave names origin
According to this site: http://www.ecglibrary.com/ecghist.html
Originally the waves were designated as A,B,C& D but after correction they were termed as P,QRS, T.
Why PQRST and not ABCDE? The ...
- 4,786
6
votes
Where did the term "vegetative nervous system" come from?
"Vegetative" doesn't only mean related to plants, but has other less common meanings.
4 a (1) : growing or having the power of growing (2) : of, relating to, or engaged in nutritive and growth ...
- 41.2k
6
votes
Who created the codon wheel chart (not as a table)?
This answer *pre-dates* the others' focus on Rosemarie Swanson
The German Wikipedia article for the "code-sun" credits this circular diagram to Carsten Bresch and Rudolf Hausmann1.
1. ...
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6
votes
What did Francis Crick and James Watson discover that Rosalind Franklin didn't?
There were staff migrations and personality issues, information leaks between researchers and other factors. Her boss annoyed her. Watson and Crick used her geometry of a helix with previously known ...
- 9,287
6
votes
Why did Rivers replace Koch's postulates?
If you read his 1937 article, Rivers himself makes a case for why Koch's postulates are too restrictive and that all the postulates need not be satisfied to confidently associate a pathogen with a ...
- 8,216
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible