Quote of the Day!

"History is philosophy teaching by examples."

                            ~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

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/

Linear B Syllabary

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             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

1. John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B, Cambridge University Press (1958)
2. John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World, Cambridge University Press (1976)
3. 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