Sunday, September 5, 2021, 00:14
The bullet and silk
The task of inventor or scientist may seem like an equipped, calm thing, without major emotions, but there are times when a pioneer has no other choice than to use himself as an experimental subject. For example, it was the case of the Polish resurrectionist priest Casimir Zeglen, inventor of a bulletproof vest made by silk. Zeglen, the murder of the mayor of Chicago in 1893, caught him in the American city and made so much impression on him that he marked his life: he focused on developing a substance that supported the impact of the bullets. His project became famous and several volunteers offered to bring it to the test that received a shot, but the religious did not want to expose themselves to another who suffered by his debt: on July 10, 1897, after trials with wooden planks, animals and human corpses, Zeglen underwent four bullets of revolvers of different calibers, all in the chest. The smiling inventor explained that the effects “a passing sharp sensation” or “something similar were produced with someone’s fans of the knuckles.” I should have received five, but a doctor who was present in the demonstration was insisting to solve it to know what he felt.
The eyes flooded with blood
Colonel John Stapp is difficult to summarize it in a section: medical and officer of the US Air Force, he was in charge of studies on the effect of acceleration and delay on the human body. The tests (propelled in a vehicle by rocket that circulated on train rails) were initially done with mannequin shipping), ribs vomiting, lost your and members ghostly temporary loss of eyesight, with red eyes of blood. He reached 1,017 kilometers per hour, which earned him the nickname of ‘faster man on earth’, and also participated in flight experiments with the discovered cabin, in which he reached 920 kilometers per hour. In daily life we owe two important contributions: the impulse for the seat belts in the cars and the law of Murphy, which “if something can go wrong, will go wrong”, which apparently gave his classical formulation of the words of an engineer that was born that way.
On the tenth day he finally told him at home
The Australian researcher Barry Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren, with whom he eventually shared the Nobel Prize, came across and rejection of the academic community: they defended the bacterial origin of stomach ulcers, for the prevailing doctrine that they wrote to stress and spicy food. After he had bumped into the contempt of his colleagues several times, he was tired of considering the suffering of patients who could be perfectly treated with antibiotics, Marshall collected ‘helicobacter pylori’ from a patient and took it in a liquid solution with meat extract, thinking that its effects would be slow. But no: three days he started to feel nausea and to present halitosis; Of the five, vomiting; Until the eighth they made an endoscopy that showed that he was suffering gastritis and that his stomach was colonized by the bacteria. And after ten days he finally said to his wife: “He should have registered his reaction – he said years later to” discover ” – but it was clear that he wanted him to stop the experiment and take antibiotics. I was paranoid and feared that we all ended up with ulcer and cancer. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Bunjillo de Indias. “
Two trips in one
This count should not be completed without a mention of the celebrated ‘Day of the Bicycle’, on April 19, 1943, when the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann decided to have 250 micrograms of the substance that had synthesized, the food of Lysectuuric, better known as LSD Intam. That inaugural ‘journey’ started with frightening sensations, during the famous cycle route to his house, but Hofmann enjoyed “unprecedented colors”, “games of shapes” and “kaleidoscopic and fantastic images”, an experience that is much more pleasant than Marshall’s with the Helikobácter.
