100 YEARS AGO

It is reported that a young Austrian doctor named Sachs has fallen a victim to his scientific zeal having accidentally inoculated himself with plague, from the effects of which he died after a short illness. Such regrettable incidents will occur while scientific research is pursued, and cannot be avoided even by the greatest foresight. There is no likelihood that other cases will develop, as under good hygienic conditions plague is not particularly infectious from man to man, and European doctors and nurses tending the sick seldom contract the disease.

ALSO...

In the course of a recent article published in the Recueil de l'Institut botanique de Bruxelles, Prof. Errera comes to the conclusion that it is not possible for organisms to exist of a size very appreciably smaller than those which can be observed with the highest powers of the microscope now in use. An estimation is made of the number of molecules of certain bodies, such as albuminoids, which are present in a bacterium of given size: the number is of such an order of magnitude that only a few molecules could be present in an organism having a diameter 0.01μ, and thus a minimum limit to the possible size is obtained.

From Nature 11 June 1903.

50 YEARS AGO

Meeting on “Preservation of Normal Tissues for Transplantation”. In opening the scientific proceedings, Prof. P. B. Medawar (University College London) said that living skin, when transplanted into positions formerly occupied by skin, was probably the most exacting of all tissues... Under the heading [of modifying host reactions] Prof. Medawar outlined experiments done in collaboration with R. E. Billingham and L. Brent which showed that if an animal were presented with living foreign cells in foetal life, its power to react against those cells in later life was reduced or wholly abolished. This was not due, as had been widely assumed, to an adaptation of the grafted cells, but to an adaptation of the host, for 'actively acquired tolerance', once established by inoculation of the foetus, extended to cells freshly transplanted in later life — cells which therefore had had no opportunity to adapt themselves to alien soil.

From Nature 13 June 1953.