Month: February 2023

19th century Swiss physiologist Friedrich Miescher must have had a strong stomach. Because his work not only involved sniffing discarded surgical bandages to check that they were fresh, but then washing pus from them. Why was he doing this? Well, he was trying to isolated white blood cells in order to find out more about their chemical composition. And in the process he discovered a curious new substance – one that he named ‘nuclein’ but which is today known by the far more familiar name of DNA – the genetic material.

Find out more in Episode 1 of ‘DNA papers’ – a new series of podcasts hosted on the #chsmorg Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine website in which a panel of guests chat about…well, DNA and its story. And a massive thanks to Dr. Neeraja Sankaran for coming up with this great new project, putting it all together & the invitation to contribute! https://lnkd.in/e9A4Vkzj

I’ve been gripped by the recent Cold War TV drama ‘A Spy Among Friends’ based on Ben MacIntyre’s book, but having spent the past few years immersed in writing about insulin and diabetes, I think I may have spotted glaring error in the portrayal of the condition in the TV dramatisation. In Episode 1, when MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott (played by Damian Lewis) suffers what appeared to be an attack of hypoglycaemia due to having diabetes, why did he suddenly break off from an intelligence debrief, to stagger out into the corridor, collapse against the wall and inject himself with a hypodermic syringe that I presume was meant to contain insulin??? This would have sent his already low blood sugars plunging even lower to dangerous levels!!?? A guaranteed way to put himself into a coma – or worse! Surely he would have known to grab a handful of sugar lumps from the tea he was sharing with Anna Maxwell-Davies and scoff them??? But I guess that’s maybe not as visually dramatic as a plunging a hypodermic needle into oneself?