100 YEARS AGO

The Health Department of the City of London has had a number of samples of ice-creams bacteriologically examined. A large proportion of the samples were found to be unsatisfactory; in several micro-organisms were very numerous, while in some virulent organisms of the Bacillus coli type were present; one contained pyogenic organisms and produced abscesses in guinea-pigs, and another contained an anaërobic organism, perhaps the bacillus of malignant oedema. Many of the ice-creams from which samples were examined had set up gastro-enteritis in boys employed by the Post Office.

ALSO...

New fields for research are continually opening up; the last illustration of this is the discovery by Prof. G. Elliot Smith that it is possible to map the convolutions of the brains of non-mummified ancient Egyptians. The brain is naturally preserved in the vast majority of the bodies in Egyptian cemeteries from predynastic to recent Coptic, the favourable conditions being burial in dry soil and removal from all direct access to the air... In a memoir, which will be published in a short time, he intends to give a full account of the structure of the brain in the predynastic and protodynastic Egyptians.

From Nature 6 November 1902.

50 YEARS AGO

The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for 1952 has been awarded to Prof. Selman Abraham Waksman... for his discovery of streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic against tuberculosis. Prof. Waksman was born in 1888 in Priluka, a small town in the Ukraine, emigrated to the United States in 1910 and became a naturalized citizen there in 1915. The whole of his scientific life since 1911 has been spent at Rutgers University and has been devoted to the study of microbiology, and particularly to that group of soil micro-organisms which are frequently spoken of as ray fungi and belong to the genus Actinomyces or Streptothrix. Following the discovery of penicillin, which is fully effective only against Gram-positive bacteria, Waksman and his collaborators began, in 1939, a systematic search for an antibiotic active against Gram-negative bacteria and found it, in 1944, in streptomycin, a metabolic product of Streptomyces griseus... They also showed that streptomycin is highly active in vitro against Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

From Nature 8 November 1952.