Legacy is defined as something handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor. The legacy of a great scientist includes not only their seminal work, but also the people they have mentored and inspired. Immunologist William Erwin Paul, who died on September 18 of this year, left just such a legacy. Bill Paul, as everyone knew him, was an extraordinary scientist, administrator, and...

Our mouth waters when we think of our favourite food, and so does that of a dog. But can we know what a dog is thinking about? An experimental entry to a dog's mind was achieved by Pavlov through a rather convoluted chain of studies performed at the beginning of the century that is now coming to an end. His approach is now common knowledge. If presentation of food is preceded every time by a be...

Although the structure of thiamin (vitamin B,) has been known for over 40 years (Williams, 1936; Grewe, 1936) and its chemical synthesis accomplished soon thereafter (Williams & Cline, 1936; Andersag & Westphal, 1937; Todd & Bergel, 1937), the biosynthetic pathway to thiamin (3) has still not been elucidated completely. It is well established that the pyrimidine (1) and thiazole (2) moieties ar...

Andrew Francis Dixon studied human anatomy and egg [2] cells at the turn of the twentieth century in Ireland and Great Britain. Dixon studied the sensory and motor nervous system of the face, the cancellous bone tissue of the femur, supernumerary kidneys, and the urogenital system. In 1927 Dixon described a mature human ovarian follicle. This follicle, Dixon noted, contained an immature human e...

Türing’s argument that there can be no machine computing the diagonal on the enumeration of the computable sequences is not a demonstration. As well known, Türing historical article of 1936 is the result of a special endeavor focused around the factuality of a general process for algorithmic computation. As resultant formal model his famous abstract computing machine, soon called Türing machine...