How About That Cup Of Coffee?

Guest blog post by Rachael Bloom.

Confession time: I have all of these grand ideas about what it will be like when I am a "Real Scientist" (tm). One, for inexplicable reasons my 20-20 vision will require me to wear a very stately pair of tortoise-shell glasses. Two, I will never have to use headphones to listen to my music ever again, speakers on full volume because ‘tenure' means doing whatever you want, right? And finally, three, I will sit around all day in my ivory tower lab, and I will study whatever catches my fancy about the universe. Not naive at all, right? I know, "firm grip on reality" is my middle name.

However, the last postulate seems to be true for one J. R. Jackson, who, in the June 16, 1870 issue of Nature, published a paper on Coffee. Simply titled as the aforementioned, Jackson opens his article with a musing--

Gratuitous capitalization of words aside--(it appears that now adding ‘-ome' to the ends of nouns in science has replaced Capitalization of Important Words)-- one can just imagine this guy sitting in his lab by himself, looking pensively into his cup of coffee and thinking, "What cup of coffee am I on now..." only to then be struck by a meteor of inspiration, "well how about that cup of coffee..."

Let me just say, old papers are really fun to read. Even if it's just for the fact that you know some poor intern had to scan all of those hard copies into PDFs, or had to take out the microfiche reel or something. There are also some notable differences. The language has changed. With the advent of large-scale collaborations fueled by high-speed internet methods of communication, the number of authors on papers as increased.

One of the best things about really old papers are the illustrations. I won't admit to you that I naturally assumed that coffee beans were actual beans, and instead pretend that I knew all along they are really berries that come from a tree, but J.R. Jackson presents some handy illustrations on the natural form of the coffee plant.

Caption: Excuse me, at what magnification is that exactly?

J.R. Jackson goes on to add somewhat subjectively: "The most satisfactory way of purchasing coffee, however, is in the whole state, and to grind it as it is wanted, when all the freshness of the aroma is obtained in the infusion. For examination under the microscope, coffee should be previously soaked in water, or boiled in a weak solution of potash; this both softens the tissues and makes the substance more transparent."

I love that this guy is just earnestly looking at coffee under a microscope. It just goes to show how we're naturally inclined to think about and be interested in the things that affect our day to day lives. Hermann Emil Fischer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1902, ostensibly for "his work on sugar and purine syntheses", but the research that led up to that included elucidating the structure of caffeine, which in the 1902 award ceremony speech, acknowledged the importance of Fischer's work towards the field of chemistry, and also that caffeine was "so greatly appreciated in daily life."

As a student, research can seem frustratingly myopic. I spend all day (and then day after day) focused on one microRNA in one cell type and a few target genes. I'm around enough disgruntled grad students and post docs to see that we sometimes forget why we were interested in science in the first place. It's nice to be reminded that the way scientific discovery starts is with genuine interest in the natural world.

So if ever you get bogged down in the bureaucracy or repetitiveness of science, take a leaf out of J.R. Jackson's Nature article. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and marvel at the little things. Cheers. Or, you know, Good morning.

P.S. If you're ever interested in checking out some old papers, check out the paper that Watson and Crick published on the structure of DNA. If you're a student, pick a favorite (older) prof and try to find papers that they published as graduate students. If you want to make someone feel really old, ask them if they had to hire a typist to type their thesis on a typewriter.

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Sources:

Original paper on Coffee: /scitable/nature/journal/v2/n33/pdf/002126a0.pdf Wikipedia, on coffee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

Presentation Speech by Professor Hj. Théel, President of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on December 10, 1902 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1902/press.html