50 Years Ago

Modern technology is confronting us with an exceedingly perplexing biological problem... It is the problem of how men and communities can adapt themselves to an environment which is changing with unprecedented speed [and] confronts teachers of all kinds at every level of education. One aspect of it — the higher education of technologists — is...specially important because technologists are now becoming the pacemakers for social change... The technologist is up to his neck in human problems whether he likes it or not. Take a simple example: the civil engineer who builds a road into a new territory in tropical Africa. He may assert that it is not his business to take into account the effect his road will have on primitive villages up-country...but he cannot afford to be utterly ignorant of the implications of his work.

From Nature 28 September 1957.

100 Years Ago

“Food inspection and adulteration” — [A] more drastic and far-reaching enactment is just now coming into force in the United States, and the working of one of its provisions in particular will be watched with much interest in this country. Its effect is to ensure that articles of food and drugs shall be labelled so as to show the purchaser, within limits, exactly what the articles are. The description must not be “false or misleading in any particular,” whether as to composition, quality, origin, or what not. Thus an article must be stated on the label to be “prepared with glucose,” “coloured with sulphate of copper,” “dyed with aniline dye,” or to be “composed of fragments and scraps from a mushroom cannery,” and so on, as the case may be. Moreover, in the case of certain drugs — morphia, cocaine, chloral, chloroform, and others — the proportions must always be stated on the label.

From Nature 26 September 1907.