Biology W
Who was Wagner-Jauregg, Julius ?
Wagner-Jauregg, Julius (1857–1940) Austrian Neurologist, Psychiatrist Julius Wagner was born on March 7, 1857, in Wels, Austria, to Adolf Johann Wagner. He attended the Schotten gymnasium in Vienna and in 1880 received his medical degree at the Institute of General and Experimental Pathology, where he stayed for two years.
In 1889 he was appointed extraordinary professor at the medical faculty of the University of Graz. Here he started his investigations on the connections between goiter and cretinism, and, based on his research, the government started selling salt laced with iodine in the areas most affected by goiter. From 1893 to 1928 he was professor at the University of Vienna.
His main publication was a book titled Verhütung und Behandlung der progressiven Paralyse durch Impfmalaria (Prevention and treatment of progressive paralysis by malaria inoculation) in the memorial volume of the Handbuch der experimentellen Therapie (Handbook of experimental therapy) (1931). His other works include Myxödem und Kretinismus in the Handbuch der Psychiatrie (1912) and Lehrbuch der Organotherapie (Textbook of organotherapy) with G. Bayer (1914). He published more than 80 papers after he retired in 1928.
Later in life, he devoted himself to research in forensic medicine and the legal aspects of insanity, and he assisted in formulating the law regarding certification of the insane in Austria. He died on September 27, 1940.
Who was Waksman, Selman Abraham ?
Waksman, Selman Abraham (1888–1973) was American Biochemist Selman Abraham Waksman was born in Priluka, near Kiev, Russia, on July 22, 1888, to Jacob Waksman and Fradia London. He received his early education from private tutors and school training in Odessa in an evening school, also with private tutors.
In 1911 he entered Rutgers College, having won a state scholarship the previous spring, and received a B.S. in agriculture in 1915. He was appointed research assistant in soil bacteriology at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, and continued graduate work at Rutgers, obtaining an M.S. in 1916, the year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1918 he was appointed a research fellow at the University of California, where he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry the same year.
He was invited back to Rutgers, and by 1930 was a professor. When the Department of Microbiology was organized in 1940, he became professor of microbiology and head of the department, and nine years later he was appointed director of the Institute of Microbiology. He retired in 1958.
Waksman brought medicine from the soil. By studying soil-based acintomycetes, he was able to extract a number of antibiotics such as actinomycin (1940), clavacin, streptothricin (1942), streptomycin (1943), grisein (1946), neomycin (1948), fradicin, candicidin, candidin, and more. His discovery of streptomycin, which was the first effective treatment against tuberculosis, brought him the 1952 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
He published more than 400 scientific papers and has written, alone or with others, 18 books, including Principles of Soil Microbiology (1927) and My Life with the Microbes (1954), an autobiography. He was a member of numerous scientific organizations. In 1950 he was made commander of the French Légion d’Honneur, and in 1952 was voted as one of the most outstanding 100 people in the world today. He died on August 16, 1973, in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
what is Wallace’s line ?
An imaginary line drawn by A. R. Wallace that passes between the Philippines and the Moluccas in the north and between Sulawesi and Borneo and between Lombok and Bali in the south (the Mariana Trench). It separates the Oriental and Australian biogeographical regions. It marks the limits of distribution for many major animal groups that appear on one side of the line but are absent on the other side.
Who was Warburg, Otto Heinrich ?
Warburg, Otto Heinrich (1883–1970) was German Biochemist Otto Heinrich Warburg was born on October 8, 1883, in Freiburg, Baden, to physicist Emil Warburg. He studied chemistry under Emil Fischer and received his doctor of chemistry from the University of Berlin in 1906, and a doctor of medicine from the University of Heidelberg in 1911.
In 1918 he was appointed professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, Berlin-Dahlem, and from 1931 to 1953 he was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology (now Max Planck Institute) in Berlin.
He specialized in the investigation of metabolism in tumors and respiration of cells. He discovered that flavins and the nicotinamide were the active groups of the hydrogen-transferring enzymes, and early discovery of iron–oxygenase provided details of oxidation and reduction (redux reactions) in the living organisms. For his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzymes that enable cells to process oxygen, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1931. He was offered a second Nobel Prize in 1944 for his enzyme work, but he was not allowed to accept it, since he was living under the Hitler regime. He later discovered how the conversion of light energy to chemical energy is activated in photosynthesis. During the 1930s he showed the carcinogenic nature of food additives and cigarette smoke and demonstrated how cancer cells are destroyed by radiation.
Warburg is the author of New Methods of Cell Physiology (1962). He died on August 1, 1970.
what is warm-blooded ?
Refers to organisms that maintain a constant body temperature. Also known as HOMEOTHERMIC.
what is water potential ?
Direction of water flow based on solute concentration and pressure. An example is osmosis, which is the diffusion of water across a semipermeable barrier, such as a cell membrane, from high water potential to lower water potential.
Also a measure of the moisture stress in plants or soil, measured in megapascals. A more negative value indicates greater moisture stress. Soils with no moisture stress have a water potential of 0 to –1 mPa. The measurement of soil water potential involves the use of sensors that determine the energy status of the water in soil. The energy state describes the force that holds the water in the soil. Two methods of measuring soil water potential are the heat dissipation method or the electrical resistance method.
what is water table ?
The level below the earth’s surface at which the ground becomes saturated with water; usually mimics the surface contour and is set where hydrostatic pressure equals atmospheric pressure.
what is water vascular system ?
An internally closed network of watery canals in echinoderms (e.g., starfish, sand dollars, sea urchins) that draws water from the surrounding sea and passes it through a perforated plate called the madreporite, which is used for locomotion and food gathering. Extensions of the water vascular system are called tube feet, which protrude from the body, usually ending in suckers, and are used for locomotion and for holding on to the sea bottom or prey.
what is wavelength ?
The physical distance between points of corresponding phase of two consecutive cycles of a wave.
Who was Wegener, Alfred Lothar ?
Wegener, Alfred Lothar (1880–1930) was German Geophysicist, Meteorologist, Climatologist Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin on November 1, 1880, the son of a minister who ran an orphanage. He obtained his doctorate in planetary astronomy in 1904 at the University of Berlin. In 1905 Wegener took a job at the Royal Prussian Aeronautical Observatory near Berlin, studying the upper atmosphere with kites and balloons. Wegener was an expert balloonist, as proved the following year when he and his brother Kurt set a world record of 52 consecutive hours in an international balloon contest.
In 1911, at the age of 30, Wegener collected his meteorology lectures and published them as a book titled The Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere. It became a standard in Germany, and Wegener received acclaim. He also noticed the close fit between the coastlines of Africa and South America. He was formulating his theory of continental drift and began to search for paleontological, climatological, and geological evidence in support of his theory.
On January 6, 1912, at a meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt, he spoke about his ideas of “continental displacement” (continental drift), and presented his theory again days later at a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Natural Science in Marburg.
In 1914 he was drafted into the German army, was wounded, and served out the war in the army weatherforecasting service. While recuperating in a military hospital, he further developed his theory of continental drift, which he published the following year as Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The origin of continents and oceans). Expanded versions of the book were published in 1920, 1922, and 1929. Wegener wrote that around 300 million years ago, the continents had formed a single mass, called Pangaea (Greek for “all the Earth”), which split apart, and its pieces had been moving away from each other ever since. While he was not the first to suggest that the continents had once been connected, he was the first to present the evidence, although he was wrong in thinking that the continents moved by “plowing” into each other through the ocean floor. His theory was soundly rejected, although a few scientists did agree with his premise.
In November 1930 he died while returning from a rescue expedition that brought food to a party of his colleagues camped in the middle of the Greenland ice cap. His body was not found until May 12, 1931, but his friends allowed him to rest forever in the area that he loved.
The theory of continental drift continued to be controversial for many years, but by the 1950s and 1960s, plate tectonics was all but an accepted fact and taught in schools. Today, we know that both continents and ocean floor float as solid plates on underlying rock that behaves like a viscous fluid due to being under such tremendous heat and pressure. Wegener never lived to see his theory proved. Had he lived, most scientists believe he would have been the champion of present-day plate tectonics.
Who was Weller, Thomas Huckle ?
Weller, Thomas Huckle (1915– ) American Microbiologist Thomas Huckle Weller was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 15, 1915, to Carl Vernon Weller, who was in the pathology department of the medical school at the University of Michigan. He attended this university in 1932 and received a B.A. in 1936 and an M.S. in 1937.
In 1936 he attended Harvard Medical School in Boston and worked in the facilities in the department of comparative medicine and tropical medicine. In 1939 he began research on viruses and tissue culture techniques to study infectious disease. He received an M.D. in 1940 and began training at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. After a stint with the Army Medical Corps during the war, he returned to Boston and the Children’s Hospital. In 1947 he joined John ENDERS in the organization of the new research division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Medical Center. In 1949 he became assistant director of this division and later became an instructor in the department of comparative pathology and tropical medicine and an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School of Public Health. In July 1954 he was appointed Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Tropical Public Health and head of the department at the Harvard School of Public Health. From 1966 to 1981 he was director of Harvard’s Center for the Prevention of Infectious Diseases.
He contributed a great deal of research on the helminthes parasites of humans, particular on the nematode Trichirella spiralis and schistosome trematodes, which cause schistosomiasis. He isolated the viruses of varicella and herpes zoster, showing that one caused both diseases. In 1955 he also isolated a virus that causes cytomegalic inclusion disease in infants. Together with J. F. Enders and F. C. ROBBINS, he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for work in growing polio viruses in cultures of different tissues.
what is West Nile disease ?
A mosquito-borne disease that can cause encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, and caused by a flavivirus. West Nile fever is a disease that has occurred before in Egypt, Asia, Israel, South Africa, and parts of Europe, but it had never before been found in the Western Hemisphere until recently, appearing in America in 1999. In 2003, West Nile virus had killed 223 people in the United States, and there were 9,122 confirmed human cases of the disease worldwide. Closely related to the St. Louis encephalitis.
Who was Whipple, George Hoyt ?
Whipple, George Hoyt (1878–1976) was American Pathologist George Hoyt Whipple was born on August 28, 1878, in Ashland, New Hampshire, to Dr. Ashley Cooper Whipple and Frances Hoyt. Whipple was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover and received a B.A. at Yale University in 1900. He then completed course work at Johns Hopkins University and received his M.D. degree in 1905, when he was appointed assistant in pathology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1914 he was appointed professor of research medicine at the University of California Medical School and was named director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research at that university, serving as dean of the medical school during the years 1920 and 1921. In 1921 he was appointed professor of pathology and dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester and became the founding dean of the university’s School of Medicine (1921–53) and chair of the pathology department.
Whipple’s main researches were concerned with anemia and the physiology and pathology of the liver. In 1908 he began a study of bile pigments that led to his interest in the body’s manufacture of the oxygencarrying hemoglobin, an important element in the production of bile pigments. His studies dealt with the effect of foods on the regeneration of blood cells and hemoglobin in 1918. Between 1923 and 1925, his experiments in artificial anemia were instrumental in determining that iron is the most potent inorganic factor in the formation of red blood cells.
For his work on liver research and treatment of anemia, he was awarded, together with GEORGE R. MINOT and WILLIAM P. MURPHY, the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1934. Whipple published many scientific papers in physiological journals.
He died on February 2, 1976, in Rochester, New York. His birthplace home on Pleasant Street in Ashland was listed on the National Register in 1978.
what is wild type ?
The normal form, genotype, or phenotype of an organism found or first seen in nature. It can refer to the particular whole organism or to a particular mutation. It is the most frequently encountered genotype in natural breeding populations.
what is Wilson’s disease ?
An inherited condition in which copper fails to be excreted in the bile. Copper accumulates progressively in the liver, brain, kidney, and red blood cells. As the amount of copper accumulates, hemolytic anemia, chronic liver disease, and a neurological syndrome develop.
what is winterbottom’s sign ?
Swelling of the posterior cervical lymph nodes at the base of the skull that is symptomatic of having African trypanosomiasis (African sleeping sickness). Caused by a parasite and transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly. West African trypanosomiasis is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei gambiense. East African trypanosomiasis is caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense. It is confined mainly to tropical Africa and is located between 15 degrees north and 20 degrees south latitude.
what is wobble ?
The ability of certain bases at the third position of an anticodon in tRNA to form hydrogen bonds in various ways, causing alignment with several possible codons. The third base position within a codon is called the wobble position.
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