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"The Fly Room"

01/13/2023
Sadie Davenport

Pictured below is the "Fly Room," a Drosophila (fruit fly) research lab at Columbia University, where in the early twentieth century, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan and "the Fly Boys" made important discoveries about modern genetics. While Mendel founded the field of genetics, the "gene" was still an abstraction. Morgan was able to confirm that the chromosome is a physical unit of genetic material, and that the pairing of chromosomes results in genetic variance. This work also contributed to scientists' understanding of evolution. Morgan's work offered natural selection as a scientific explanation for evolution. 

      

Left: A luncheon held in "The Fly Room" in 1918. The Fly Room was reportedly small and cluttered. 

Right: The National Cancer Institute's diagram on DNA forming genes and chromosomes. 

 

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Mary Amdur's remarkable story of research ethics
02/17/2023
Sadie Davenport
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Left: Mary Amdor. Middle: The deadly fog in Donora, Pennsylvania. Right: Woman walking through the fog in Donora. 

In late October of 1948, a combination of temperature fluctuations and deadly emissions from two U.S. Steel plants created a dense, yellow fog that hung over the city of Donora, Pennsylvania, killing 70 people and injuring 6,000 others. The fog, which contained sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, and other poisonous gases, remained in the city for several days until it rained on October 31st. Doctors and firefighters shared bottled oxygen with Donora residents and urged those with pre-existing lung and breathing issues to leave, but the density of the fog made driving and transportation nearly impossible.

Dr. Mary Amdur, a biochemist with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, was recruited soon after to research the role that American Smelting and Refining Company (AS&R) emissions played in the casualties observed in Donora. AS&R wanted to prove that their emissions had a minimal effect on the deaths and injuries incurred, and they even requested that Dr. Amdur not study one of the gases released into the atmosphere. Dr. Amdur's research instead indicated that citizens of Donora were injured and killed as a direct result of the gases released: "She had demonstrated the irritancy potential of sulfur dioxide and its ability to interact with water-soluble metal salts to further oxidize the sulfur in the particle, which travels to the deep lung, where its potential for irritation would be magnified" (Mary O. Amdur, Oxford Academic). Dr. Amdur gained and lost funding multiple times because her research interfered with the interests of AS&R, which she didn't accommodate into her research. Additionally, she wasn't able to rise above the title of "associate professor" at the different universities where she worked.

For her work and her strength to stick to her own ethical principles, Dr. Mary Amdur became known as the "mother of air pollution toxicology." And in 1961, the United States adopted the Clean Air Act, which "regulates air emissions from stationary and mobile sources," in order to prevent dangerous air pollution events like Donora's. (Summary of the Clean Air Act). 

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Medicine, Health sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Environmental science, History, Politics & law
Dr. Charles Henry Turner & his bees
02/07/2023
Sadie Davenport
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Watch these videos for more insight to Charles Henry Turner's life:  

 


Charles Henry Turner taught high school and college science classes for over 30 years. During this time, he studied insect behavior using his background in biology and psychology. Turner's work changed the way that insect behavior was understood and studied. This quote from Encyclopedia Britannica summarizes this change well: "[in the early 1900s], the study of insect behaviour was dominated by 19th-century concepts of taxis and kinesis, in which social insects are seen to alter their behaviour in specific responses to specific stimuli. Through his observations Turner was able to establish that insects can modify their behaviour as a result of experience."

More on the specific contributions Dr. Turner made to insect behavior research: "During his 33-year career, Turner published more than 70 papers, many of them written while he confronted numerous challenges, including restrictions on his access to laboratories and research libraries and restrictions on his time due to a heavy teaching load at Sumner [High School]. Furthermore, Turner received meagre pay and was not given the opportunity to train research students at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. Despite these challenges, he published several morphological studies of vertebrates and invertebrates. Turner also designed apparatuses (such as mazes for ants and cockroaches and coloured disks and boxes for testing the visual abilities of honeybees), conducted naturalistic observations, and performed experiments on insect navigation, death feigning, and basic problems in invertebrate learning...He developed novel procedures to study pattern and colour recognition in honeybees (Apis), and he discovered that cockroaches trained to avoid a dark chamber in one apparatus retained the behaviour when transferred to a differently shaped apparatus" (Encyclopedia Britannica). 

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Psychology, Biology, History
The beetle discovered in prison
11/29/2022
Sadie Davenport
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Pierre Latreille was imprisoned and sentenced to be executed during the French Revolution (in the 1790s), because he would not swear an oath of allegiance to the new French state. Until this point, Latreille was a minister who studied natural history and botany under noteworthy biologists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Rene Just Hauy, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. 

Surprisingly, neither prison nor the threat of execution could end Latreille's studies. On the floor of his cell, he found a rare beetle, Necrobia ruficollis. This beetle had been described twenty years earlier, but hadn't been found and studied further. (Necrobia ruficollis is now understood to be found around dead and decaying animals and humans, as well as meat and cheese.) A prison doctor caring for the inmates noticed Latreille's attention to the insect. He agreed to have scholar Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, who was familiar with Latreille's previous studies, take a look at the beetle. St. Vincent realized that Latreille's finding was significant for the field of entomology, and promptly arranged for Latreille's release (and the release of one other inmate). All the other prisoners who remained were killed one month later. 

Red shouldered ham beetle       

Left: Necrobia ruficollis: The red-shouldered ham beetle.              

Right: Pierre Latreille, who found this rare beetle after it had been described in writing twenty years earlier. 

This beetle saved Latreille's life and launched the rest of his career. Latreille spent the remainder of his life as a teacher, a zoologist, an entomologist, and author. Eventually he worked alongside Lamarck in a French museum with an extensive arthropod collection, and became the first person to classify different types of arthropods. (An arthropod is defined in the Biology Dictionary as a group of animals with "an exoskeleton, segmented body, and jointed appendages.") After he passed, Latreille was described as "The Prince of Entomology." 
 

Read more about Latreille, and his rise from French Revolution prisoner to France's Prince of Entomology: 

- SciHi Blog: Pierre Andre Latreille

- Article: Notes on the biology of Necrobia Ruficollis 

- Bug Guide: Necrobia ruficollis - Red-Shouldered Ham Beetle

 

Biology