Plant Pigments

This is chemist Richard Willstätter. I confess that his name was not familiar to me despite his having won the 1915 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Here are two short excerpts from his Nobel biography that summarize his prize-winning research.

As a young man he studied [c. 1902] principally the structure and synthesis of plant alkaloids such as atropine and cocaine. In this, as in his later work on quinone and quinone type compounds which are the basis of many dyestuffs, he sought to acquire skill in chemical methods in order to prepare himself for the extensive and more difficult work of investigating plant and animal pigments. [From Munich he went to work in Switzerland for seven years, returning to Germany in 1912, where he took up a position in a newly established Institute of Chemistry in Berlin/Dahlem.]

In the two short years before the outbreak of the first World War he was able with a team of collaborators to round off his investigations into chlorophyll and, in connexion with that, to complete some work on haemoglobin and, in rapid succession, to carry out his studies of anthocyanes, the colouring matter of flowers and fruits. These investigations into plant pigments, especially the work on chlorophyll, were honoured by the award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1915)….

His main achievement, according to the Nobel presentation, was elucidating the chemical nature of the chlorophyll and “having been the first to recognize and to prove with complete evidence the fact that magnesium is not an impurity, but is an integral part of the native, pure chlorophyll – a fact of high importance from the biological point of view (source, the rest of which makes for very interesting reading).” By the way, “Plant Pigments” was the title of Willstätter’s Nobel lecture.

He continued to be productive after winning the prize and worked until he chose to end his career in what must have seemed a startling move.

Willstätter’s career came to a tragic end when, as a gesture against increasing antisemitism, he announced his retirement in 1924. Expressions of confidence by the Faculty, by his students and by the Minister failed to shake the fifty-three year old scientist in his decision to resign. He lived on in retirement in Munich, maintaining contact only with those of his pupils who remained in the Institute and with his successor, Heinrich Wieland, whom he had nominated. Dazzling offers both at home and abroad were alike rejected by him. In 1938 he fled from the Gestapo with the help of his pupil A. Stoll and managed to emigrate to Switzerland, losing all but a meagre part of his belongings.

He lived in Switzerland until he died on 3 August 1942, of a heart attack. I was interested to read that a memorial to Willstätter was unveiled in Muroalto, where he lived his last years, in 1956, the year I was born.

This portrait photograph (source) was taken in 1942 by an unidentified photographer. And now we come to the original reason that Willstätter is the subject of this post, namely so that I could mention that the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology has put some of their large collection of portraits of scientists and inventors online at Flickr: “Portraits of Scientists and Inventors“. This collection has 144 portraits; they tell us that the entire collection is available online in the “Scientific Identity” digital collection.

I first read about the Smithsonian Library’s adding photographs to the Flickr commons project by reading an entry in the Smithsonian Library’s blog. It wasn’t long ago that the Library of Congress delighted fans of photography by putting big chunks of their collections on Flickr in a first-of-its-kind collaboration.

It’s a lot of fun with wonderful images to see; it’s also a great sink of one’s time. But this is culture and heritage and history, right? Besides, I think we’re all better people for knowing more about Richard Willstätter now. What a learning experience is Beard of the Week!

I expect we’ll be exploring more of these portraits in the future.

Lightning Safety Awareness Week 2008

Yesterday I had a press release from NOAA letting me know that this week, 22-28 June, is “Lightning Safety Awareness Week”. Apparently it is the seventh such declared week. The motto of LSAW comes from the mouth of Leon the Lion: “When Thunder Roars, Go Indoors!”

The National Weather Service, operated by NOAA, maintains a Lightning Safety Website that is filled with useful information and other interesting lightning-awareness stuff. For instance, there is a nice gallery of photographs of lightning, whence came the dramatic photograph at right, taken by Harald Edens near Socorro, NM, 2003 (used by permission).

On the home page, towards the bottom, there is a near real-time map showing lightning strikes in the continental US (and bits north and south) over a two-hour time period (delayed, they say, about 30 minutes after the data were collected).

We learn that each year in the US an average of 62 people are killed by lightning. Of those,

• 98% were outside
• 89% were male
• 30% were males between the ages of 20-25
• 25% were standing under a tree
• 25% occurred on or near the water

We are told that lightning can strike from storms as far away as ten miles, which is why the NWS advises “When Thunder Roars, Go Indoors!” There really are no safe places to be outdoors. Either go inside a “safe building” or get inside a completely enclosed car (with metal roof). A “safe building” has walls with electrical wiring and plumbing, the latter being conductors that can get charge from a lightning strike into the ground instead of into people. Open shelters in parks, for example, are not “safe buildings”. Naturally, there’s more complete information around the NWS website.

Needless to say, perhaps, but my attention was drawn by two pages: “Lightning Science” and “Statistics and More“. Woo hoo!

From “Lightning Science”, lots of fun lightning facts:

• At any given moment, there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progress somewhere on the earth.
• There are lightning detection systems in the United States and they monitor an average of 25 million flashes of lightning from the cloud to ground every year!
• Ice crystals in a cloud seem necessary lightning, which may result from charge separation that takes place in collisions of ice crystals.
• Lightning is a rather complicated process for discharging negative charge in the cloud.

“Statistics and More” has several interesting sounding things like interesting lightning events in history, details on lightning deaths, policy statements, factsheets, and guidelines. Links can be so much fun sometimes.

My own awareness was increased this week by the rather dramatic thunderstorms we had last Sunday night, and again on Monday night, when Isaac and I were out and we both saw a brilliant stroke of lightning.

It’s Ice!

This news from NASA and the Phoenix Mars Lander seems to be traveling around with near light speed:

Bright Chunks at Phoenix Lander’s Mars Site Must Have Been Ice 06.19.08

TUCSON, Ariz. – Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench informally called “Dodo-Goldilocks” when Phoenix’s Robotic Arm enlarged that trench on June 15, during the 20th Martian day, or sol, since landing. Several were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench early today, on Sol 24.

[more]

Of course this is big news for the mission and everyone watching it. Finding evidence of water^* on Mars–even evidence of water ever having been on Mars–is usually taken as a necessary condition for finding evidence of any life existing, or having existed at one time, on Mars. Whether this is really true is another matter, but water played a necessary role for life to appear on Earth so it’s thought that no water would mean no chance of life.

Now we believe that there is currently frozen water, existing now, today, on Mars. It doesn’t mean extraterrestrial life but a serious road-block (i.e., no water) has been removed. Besides, discovering signs of water, either now or ever, has been a long, long quest for a good number of people, and now they’ve found it.

A lot of people are pretty excited.
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^* The evidence: four days ago Phoenix was digging a trench when it came upon a solid, white layer. The layer could have been frozen water or maybe something like salt. What’s happened in the last four days? Some small chunks of the white substance, loosened when Phoenix was digging, disappeared. Disappearing means evaporating (more precisely, “sublimating”, which is the word that means evaporating directly from the solid form without first melting), something that salt and other likely substances would emphatically not do, whereas exposed water ice would do exactly that.

On Reading Despicable Species

Last week I finished reading Janet Lembke’s, Despicable Species : On Cowbirds, Kudzu, Hornworms, and Other Scourges (New York : The Lyons Press, 1999. xi + 216 pages, illustrations by Joe Nutt). You might like to read my book note about it.

I like the author’s portrait inside the back cover: the gracefully maturing lady with her white hair in a bun and the tiny grin of mischief on her face. She’s one of Miss Marple’s friends who invites the lady detective to tea and talks about bugs. How charming! Or–wait!–maybe she’s the murderess and there’s arsenic in the brew.

Ms. Lembke writes with a certain genteel prose but there’s nothing soft about her subjects and her writing is fully informed by science despite her blurb’s insistence that she is, basically, a literary type. However, I don’t see why Shakespeare and taxonomic nomenclature shouldn’t get along as she so aptly demonstrates. These essays about those plants and animals most hated by her friends were charming but robust, personal but informative. Be delighted and learn: what a concept!

Here I wanted to share this little poem that Lembke quoted in the essay “Legs: Centipedes”.

The centipede was happy quite
    Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg comes after which?”
That worked her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in a ditch,
    Considering how to run.

– Mrs. Edward Caster, 1871

Evo-Devo Again

The beard at right belongs to author Wallace Arthur, Professor of Zoology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I recently read his excellent book Creatures of Accident : The Rise of the Animal Kingdom (New York, Hill and Wang, 2006. x + 255 pages). Naturally, there’s a book note, with a couple of entertaining excerpts. The book, by the way, has its own website.

This is the second book^* I’ve read about evo-devo: “evolutionary developmental biology”, sort of embryology informed by genetics and microbiology. Cool stuff, cutting edge, and learning some about it clarifies an unusual amount of evolutionary concepts for me. One key idea is that evolution doesn’t operate on adult animals, it operates on developing embryos. That small shift in perspective sheds a lot of light.

Author Arthur takes a delightfully cozy and intimate tone in his book, which I thought was almost like an expanded personal essay at times, and very enjoyable for it. Arthur managed to avoid a number of possibly intimidating details in pursuit of focusing on some central concepts over which he lingered a bit to avoid leaving any readers behind. I thought he did a great job and I enjoyed the book quite a bit. I also didn’t mind having a peek at the author’s photo inside the back cover occasionally, either.

Arthur set out to write without revealing his biases towards big questions about creation and whether a who or what was responsible for it, and he managed quite well until he got to his chapter called “Big Questions”, when he finally revealed himself. The preceding parts of the book had been so gentle that I was a bit surprised by his vehemence, although I wouldn’t argue with it in the least.

To research this chapter ["Big Questions"], I did something I had never done before: I visited some Web sites representing creationism in its many guises. This exercise was a revelation indeed, but probably not of the sort that the Webmasters had intended. What I found most striking was the appalling lack of integrity of those concerned. The deliberate misuse of quotations and details from the work of scientists suggested that all honor and honesty had been cast to the four winds. I realized that I was in a different social context from the one I have known and loved for my whole scientific career, where an honest search for the truth is at the heart of things. Instead, I was in a milieu where the dominant ethos was to force acceptance of a particular worldview by any means whatever. No holds barred. not the Spanish Inquisition perhaps, but the intention seemed the same; to stifle freedom of thought. And it mattered not whether I was in the grips of young-earth creationists or intelligent-design proponents. The latter were more slippery and difficult to pin down, but always in the end I found evidence of dishonesty. [p. 226]

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^* The first, which I got very excited about, was Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.