~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
The History Surfer
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Dr. David Pressman
Today’s
I wanted to present to you a man that was well known for his contributions to
Immunology. David Pressman attended the University of California in Los
Angeles in 1937 under the recommendation from Linus Pauling, who thought
Pressman was very gifted with his field of study. Through his efforts Mr.
Pressman became a very sought after person for research, and in 1942 he was
invited by E. E. Ecker at Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio to be a
part of the research team for Immouno-Chemical Chemistry. After a period of
consideration Pressman decided to turn down the offer to join Ecker’s research
team to pursue other interests. This lead David to applying for a position at
the University of Southern California, he was turned down and was suggested
that he try to go to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
After several years of conducting
his own research on Immuno-Chemical Chemistry David Pressman was approached by
Dr. Cornelius Rhodes of the Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. After accepting
a position with the institute Dr. Rhodes began to take special interest in Mr.
Pressman and more importantly his work on Immuno-Chemical Chemistry. Rhodes
then gave Mr. Pressman his private technician and histologist to aid his
research until a more suitable staff could be hired on. In letters between David Pressman and Linus
Pauling we know that Pressman was invited by Dr. Rhodes to run his “Pet Project”
which was under the Immunochemical Division of the research center. This would
be where Pressman begins his work with Mitochondria and how an antibody
molecule can enter a cell.
One of David Pressman’s
achievements was his paper entitled “The
Zone of Activity of Antibodies as Determined by use of Radioactive Tracers.” Although
his work was considered a breakthrough in Immunology and the paper was a grand
achievement Dr. Pressman was encouraged to retitle the paper to narrow down on
his specific goal of the project. That is why the paper was later renamed “Locating the Site of Action of Nephrotoxic Anti-Kidney
Serum through the use of a Radioactive Tracer.” Dr. Pressman also wrote the
chapter on Antibodies as Specific Chemical Reagents for VOL. III of Advances in Biological and Medical Physics. In
1961 Dr. Pressman made another breakthrough discovery with his lab partner Dr.
Roholt on sequences in the polypeptide chain associated with the region of the
specific binding site of antibodies. They then published a paper titled “Isolation of Peptides from an Antibody
Site.”
Unfortunately David Pressman
committed suicide in June of 1980, which came as a shock to his wife Mrs.
Reinie Pressman as well as his lifelong friend Dr. Linus Pauling. Linus and Eva
Pauling maintained contact with Reinie Pressman for the next two years until
January of 1982 when they received word from Adele Pressman that Reinie had
followed her husband into death by committing suicide herself.
For Additional documents concerning Dr. David Pressman, Linus Pauling, and Dr. Rhodes please visit the Linus Pauling Archives Collection at Oregon State University or online at http://pauling.library.oregonstate.edu/
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Linear B Syllabary
Photo provided by Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
In the ancient world before there was an alphabet as we know it today there were, at least in Greece, two forms of pictorial writing that we have come to know as Linear A and Linear B. While we don’t exactly know where Linear A originated from we do know that Linear B had come into being sometime either during or right before the Minoan period of Greek culture which lasted approximately from 2,600 to 1,150 BC. Linear B had also survived as a method of writing during the fall of the Palaces in 1,400 BC and began to appear in Mycenaean Greek culture most notably near Pylos only to eventually die out as fewer and fewer scribes knew how to use it.
The main site that the modern world
has discovered Linear B was at the Palace of Knossos on the Island of Crete
which was the home of the fabled King Minos who used to send young Athenians to
the labyrinth to ultimately meet their doom with the Minotaur. This palace was among the many to fall during the destruction of Greek palaces we believe
either by some natural disaster or the supposed return of the descendants of
Heracles, either way Knossos was engulfed in a great fire which helped to
preserve the Linear B clay tablets. The second site we have found tablets are
at the palace of Pylos in the southwest Peloponnese just west of Sparta. We
believe that these tablets are younger than the ones at Knossos and were
probably the result of either fleeing or captured scribes that still used the
language as a means to catalog inventories.
The credit
for the initial discovery of Linear B is given to Arthur Evans who following
the footsteps of Heinrich Schlieman who discovered the city of Troy that is mentioned
in Homer’s The Iliad. Evans ended up by half the property on which he hoped to
find the palace of Knossos in 1895 and began to excavate the site; about five
years later in 1900 he bought the second half of the property. One week into
the excavation of Knossos Evans discovered the Archive room at Knossos which
held 2,000 clay tablets. Although Arthur Evans was the original discoverer of
Linear B it was Michael Ventris who decided in 1936 while attending Evan’s
lecture on Knossos and both Linear scripts that he would grow up to Decipher
Linear writings.
For Further Reading about Linear B syllabary please consult the sources below
- John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B,
Cambridge University Press (1958)
- John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World, Cambridge
University Press (1976)
- Barbara Ann Kipfer,
Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archeology, Library of Congress, Pg. 704, http://books.google.com/books?id=XneTstDbcC0C&lpg=PA704&ots=nacw__3WnO&dq=kober's%20triplets&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Greetings from The History Surfer
Greetings to you all, I am the History Surfer and I am dedicating this blog to the preservation and creation of History. On this blog you will hear about historical events that occurred on that day in the past, prominent figures, technological innovations, and really anything History related that catches my attention.
"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree."
-Michael Crichton
"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree."
-Michael Crichton
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