MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

Isaac Asimov tells us another fascinating, intriguing scientific anecdote in A Short History of Biology:

If a protein solution is placed in an electric field, the individual protein molecules travel toward either the positive of negative electrode at a fixed speed dictated by the pattern of the electric charge, the size and shape of the molecule and so on. No two varieties of protein would travel at precisely the same speed under all conditions.

In 1937, the Swedish chemist, Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius (1902- ), a student of Svedberg’s, devised an apparatus to take advantage of this. This consisted of a special tube arranged like a rectangular U, within which a protein mixture could move in response to an electric field. (Such motion is called “electrophoresis.”) Since the various components of the mixture moved each at its own rate, there was a gradual separation. The rectangular-U tube consisted of portions that fitted together at specifically ground joints, and these portions could be slid apart. Matters could be arranged so that one of the mixture of proteins would be present in one component of the chambers and could thus be separated from the rest.

Furthermore, by the use of appropriate cylindrical lenses, it became possible to follow the process of separation by taking advantage of changes in the way light was refracted on passing through the suspended mixture as the protein concentration changed. The changes in refraction could be photographed as a wavelike pattern which could then be used to calculate the quantity of each type of protein present in the mixture.

pp. 155-156, A Short History of Biology by Isaac Asimov, American Museum Science Books, the Natural History Press, Garden City, New York, (c) 1964 Isaac Asimov.

The integration of physics, chemistry, technology, and biology is awe-inspiring and beautiful.

Mr. Asimov presents some of the discoveries and ideas in biology that led up to Tiselius’ work (such as the discovery of organic compounds and proteins), and then discusses in his book what happened after this. He focuses on the biology and chemistry. Mr. Asimov teaches correctly: the reader gets to see what basic evidence and reasoning led to the concepts, principles and theories of modern biology. The reader gets the skeleton of induction needed to grasp a concept, etc.

Most students now-a-day are trained in a mash that amounts to confusion, memorized words (like a parrot), and obedience of authority, not to understanding proper. Students are not being trained in reasoning and objectivity.

To properly understand Tiselius’ work, one would need to learn that which Mr. Asimov presented, but one would also need to learn some of the scientific work of Michael Faraday (The Laws of Electrolysis) and Willebrord Snellius (Snell’s Law of Refraction). What’s more, Tiselius’ work has to be clearly rooted in the work of Galileo and Newton, who studied telescopes and light, studied motion and gravity, and started modern science. There are also ideas developed in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s that are essential to achieving a real, inductive, objective understanding.

Update (9-4-09, 8:15 AM):  And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the development of mathematics, Aristotle’s development of logic, and the integration of mathematics and the physical and biological sciences.

Isaac Asimov writes, in A Short History of Biology:

Meanwhile, those steps in the breakdown of glycogen that lay beyond lactic acid and that did require oxygen could be studied by means of a new technique developed by a German biochemist, Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883- ). In 1923, he devised a method for preparing thin slices of tissue (still alive and absorbing oxygen) and measuring their oxygen uptake. He used a small flask attached to a thin U-shaped tube. In the bottom of the tube was a colored solution. Carbon dioxide produced by the tissue was absorbed by a small well of alkaline solution within the flask. As oxygen was absorbed without being replaced in the air by carbon dioxide, a partial vacuum was produced in the flask and the liquid in the U-tube was sucked upward toward the flask. The rate of level change of the fluid, measured under carefully controlled conditions, yielded the rate of oxygen uptake.

The influence of different compounds on this rate of uptake could then be studied. If a particular compound restored the rate after it had fallen off, it might be taken to be an intermediate in the series of reactions involved in oxygen uptake. The Hungarian biochemist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893- ) and the German-British biochemist, Hans Adolf Krebs (1900- ), were active in this respect. Krebs had, indeed, by 1940, worked out all the main steps in the conversion of lactic acid to carbon dioxide and water, and this sequence of reactions is often called the “Krebs cycle.” Earlier, during the 1930s, Krebs had also worked out the main steps in the formation of the waste product, urea, from the amino acid building blocks of proteins. This removed the nitrogen and the remainder of the amino acid molecules could, as Rubner had shown almost a half-century earlier (see page 89), be broken down to yield energy.

Hand in hand with this increase of knowledge concerning the internal chemistry of the cell came in increase of knowledge concerning the fine structure of the cell. New techniques for the purpose were developed. In the early 1930s, the first “electron microscope” was built. … Particles no larger than very large molecules could be made out and the protoplasm of the cell was found to be an almost bewildering complex of small but highly organized structures called “organelles” or “particulates.”

pp. 146-148, A Short History of Biology by Isaac Asimov, American Museum Science Books, the Natural History Press, Garden City, New York, (c) 1964 Isaac Asimov.

This work depended on the work of prior scientists in, for example, the discovery, isolation, and characterization of oxygen and carbon dioxide by Van Helmont and Priestley; the work in chemistry of Lavoisier and Cavendish and others; Lavoisier’s idea that the process of life was the same as that of combustion; the study of “vacuum” above a fluid; the laws of gases as developed by Boyle, Charles’, and others; the fundamental work of Galileo and Newton.

The way biology is presented by Mr. Asimov is close to how science should be taught. As science is taught today, ideas come out of nowhere, like flotsam and jetsam, with no induction, integration, rationale, or cause-effect relationships. It is no wonder that the state of science education and people’s knowledge of science is impoverished. And it is no wonder that they have the idea that science is detached from everyday life and thought!

Update (4:15 PM): FYI, Mr. Asimov, writing a “short” history, does not discuss physics, or at least not much. He focuses mainly on the history of biology as such, with some discussion of chemistry.

Update (9-4-09, 8:15 AM):  And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the development of mathematics, Aristotle’s development of logic, and the integration of mathematics and the physical and biological sciences.

Isaac Asimov writes, in A Short History of Biology:

Since a candle and an animal both produce carbon dioxide and consume oxygen, it seemed reasonable to Lavoisier to suppose that respiration was a form of combustion and that when a particular amount of oxygen was consumed, a corresponding quantity of heat was produced whether it was a candle or a mouse that was involved. His experiments in this direction were necessarily crude (considering the measuring techniques then available) and his results only approximate, but they seemed to bear out his contention.

This was a powerful stroke on the side of the mechanistic view of life, for it seemed to imply that the same chemical process was taking place in both living and nonliving matter. This made it that much more reasonable to suppose that the same laws of nature governed both realms as the mechanists insisted.

Lavoisier’s point was strengthened as the science of physics developed during the first half of the nineteenth century. In those decades, heat was being investigated by a number of scientists whose interest was aroused by the growing importance of the steam engine. Heat, by means of the steam engine, could be made to do work, and so could other phenomena, such as falling bodies, flowing water, air in motion, light, electricity, magnetism, and so on. In 1807, the English physician, Thomas Young (1773-1829), suggested “energy” as a word to represent all phenomena out of which work could be obtained. It comes from the Greek words meaning “work within.”

The physicists of the early nineteenth century studied the manner in which one form of energy could be converted to another, and made increasingly refined measurements of such changes. By the early 1840s, at least three men, an Englishman, James Prescott Joule (1818-89), and two Germans, Julius Robert von Mayer (1814-78) and Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-94), had advanced the concept of the “conservation of energy.” According to this concept, one form of energy might be freely converted into another, but the total amount of energy could neither be decreased nor increased in the process.

It seemed natural for such a broadly general law, based on a wide variety of meticulous measurements, to apply to living processes as well as nonliving. The mere fact that no living animal could continue living without obtaining energy continuously from its food made it seem that life processes could not create energy out of nothing. Plants did not eat and breathe in quite the same way animals did, but, on the other hand, they could not live unless they were periodically bathed in the energy of light.

pp. 48-49, A Short History of Biology by Isaac Asimov, American Museum Science Books, the Natural History Press, Garden City, New York, (c) 1964 Isaac Asimov.