100 YEARS AGO

In the history of vegetable physiology, sufficient importance has not been given to Dante's observations upon the action of solar light and heat upon plants, and to the ideas upon this action that existed in Italy in the fourteenth century. ⃛ It is not unlikely that the verses of Dante influenced Leonardo da Vinci in believing that “the sun giveth spirit and life to plants, and the soil with its moisture nourisheth them, ” leading him to an experiment in which the importance of leaf-function in the nourishment of plants is first noted, two hundred years before Malpighi. In this experiment Leonardo caused a water-fed plant to grow prosperously and bear fruit abundantly, although its roots had purposely been reduced to “only one tiny rootlet” (solamente una minima radice). Leonardo thus succeeded in causing a plant to grow chiefly by its foliage, to “vivere della cima” (“Paradiso”, xviii. 29): an experiment that would have been too dangerous for the experimenter in Dante's days.

From Nature 2 March 1899.

50 YEARS AGO

Last August scientific workers from all over the world heard with deep disappointment that the Soviet Union had officially adopted an isolationist attitude on certain branches of biology. For the first time in the U.S.S.R. there was established a ‘party line’ in one of the natural sciences. Since then there has been speculation as to whether this attitude might extend to other natural sciences, and a recent broadcast from Moscow gives point to these speculations. On January 26, 1949, the philosopher Alexander Alexandrovitch Maximov, who is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and who belongs to the staff of its Institute of Philosophy, gave a broadcast on the Moscow Radio Home Service. The theme of his talk was the correct Bolshevik attitude to natural science. He attacks those foreign physicists who “regard as synonymous the philosophical definition of matter and the objective idea of reality”, and who are responsible for other “idealistic misinterpretations” in relativity and quantum theory. He indicts by name Einstein, Niels Bohr and Heisenberg.

From Nature 5 March 1949.