Today’s Birthdays, August 13

Today is the birthday of Anders Angstrom, born in 1814, one of the founders of the science of
Spectrocopy.  His combination of the spectroscope and photography for the study of the solar system resulted in proving that the sun’s atmosphere contains hydrogen, among other elements.  The Angstrom Unit, 10­­^-10 is named in his honor.  It shows how feeble our thinking is that we no longer use this unit of measurement, it is just the right unit for describing the size of atoms.

Today is also the birthday of Erasmus Bartholin, born in 1625, he is remembered especially for his discovery in 1669 of the double refraction of a light ray by Icelandic spar.

And Sir George Stokes, born in 1819, made important contributions to fluid dynamics including the Navier-Stokes equations.

Johann Miescher, born in 1844, in 1869, he isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals, which he called nuclein (now nucleic acids) from the nuclei of white blood cells.

Richard Willstatter, born in 1872, received the 1915 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his study of the structure of plant pigments, including chlorophyll. He also invented paper chromatography independently of Mikhail Tsvet.

Frederick Sanger born in 1918, Is the only person to become a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry for his work on the structure of proteins, especially insulin.  Walter Gilbert and Sanger shared half of the chemistry prize “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids.”

Birthdays, July 24

Today is the birthday of Britton Chance, born in 1913, he invented the stopped flow device to measure the existence of the enzyme-substrate complex in enzyme reactions. He also used noninvasive techniques such as phophorus NMR and optical spectroscopy and flurometry to study metabolic control in living tissue and to  characterize properties of tissue along with breast tumors. Born in Wilks-Barre, Pennsylvania, he won a gold medal in the 1952 Summer Olympis in sailing.

Today is also the birthday of Thomas Platter the Younger, born in 1574, he was a Swiss physician who kept journals of his life between 1595 and 1600.  These journals provide details of 16^th century life as well as Platter’s time spent in medical school including details on dissections.

Johan Forchhammer, born in 1794 was a geologist who found that the concentration of seawater salts collected from varous locations was constant. This is known as the Forchhammer’s Priniciple or the Principle of Constant Proportions.