Melvin Calvin

Melvin Calvin (Saint Paul, 8 de abril de 1911 - Berkeley, 8 de enero de 1997) fue un
químico y profesor universitario estadounidense galardonado con el Premio Nobel
de Química en 1961.

Melvin nació en el seno de una familia de inmigrantes rusos en Saint

Paul, Minnesota. Se crio en Detroit. Cursó estudios de química en la Escuela de
Minería y Tecnología de Míchigan (hoy Universidad Tecnológica de Míchigan),
donde se licenció en 1931. Posteriormente amplío sus estudios en la Universidad
de Minnesota, donde se doctoró en 1935 y al año siguiente consiguió realizar una
beca postdoctoral en la Universidad de Mánchesteren Inglaterra.

Se incorporó al departamento de química de la Universidad de California,

en Berkeley, en 1937 y en 1947 consiguió ser nombrado profesor de química. En esa
misma universidad fue director del Laboratorio Lawrence de Radiaciones del
Departamento de Química Biológica.

Investigaciones científicas
Su carrera se inició tras un accidente ocurrido en 1936 en la fábrica de tintes que
Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) tenía en Mánchester. Se elaboraba un compuesto
incoloro llamado ftalonitrilo, pero una partida salió de un bello color azul, al
parecer por una grieta en el forro de vidrio del recipiente. Se identificó como
ftalocianina, miembro de una nueva, y estructuralmente interesante, familia de
compuestos.

Calvin, que llegaba a la Universidad de Mánchester para realizar estudios

posdoctorales, trabajaba con el profesor Michael Polanyi y vio que el compuesto de
la ICI tenía un parecido estructural con la hemomolécula y con la clorofila: las dos
moléculas catalíticas más importantes en los seres vivos y, bioquímicamente, las
más difíciles de comprender y de imitar. Siguió la sugerencia de Polanyi de
emplear el compuesto de la ICI como modelo para investigar la conexión entre la
estructura y la estabilidad en esas moléculas tan fundamentales.

Durante la década de 1940, en su estancia en Berkeley, comenzó sus experimentos

sobre la fotosíntesis sobre cultivos del alga verde unicelular Chlorella pyrenoidosa,
separando los compuestos obtenidos por cromatografía bidimensional e
identificándolos gracias al carbono-14 y esclareciendo el proceso de asimilación
fotoquímica del dióxido de carbono por las partes verdes de las plantas, hoy
frecuentemente denominado ciclo Calvin.

Fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Química en 1961 por sus trabajos sobre la
asimilación del dióxido de carbono por las plantas.
Melvin Calvin
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
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(Born April 8, 1911, St. Paul, Minn., U.S. died Jan. 8, 1997, Berkeley, Calif.) U.S.
biochemist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He developed
a system of using the radioactive isotope carbon-14 as a tracer element in his
studies of the green alga chlorella. By halting the plant's metabolism at various
stages and measuring tiny amounts of radioactive compounds present, Calvin was
able to identify most of the reactions involved in the intermediate steps of
photosynthesis, for which he was awarded a 1961 Nobel Prize. His research also
included work in radiation chemistry and the processes leading to the origin of
life.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/melvin-calvin#ixzz2ff5AdK79

Vida Victoriosa de Marie Curie, La - Biografía escrita por Eve Curie, hija de Marie
y Pierre.
Marie Curie – Biographical

Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867,
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the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in
local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a
students' revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then
in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was
under Austrian rule.

In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she
obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre
Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they
were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the
Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic
death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in
the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also
appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the
University of Paris, founded in 1914.

Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under
difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake
much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri
Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses
which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth,
and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from
radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the
careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.

Mme. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate
suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Irene, she personally
devoted herself to this remedial work. She retained her enthusiasm for science
throughout her life and did much to establish a radioactivity laboratory in her
native city - in 1929 President Hoover of the United States presented her with a gift
of $ 50,000, donated by American friends of science, to purchase radium for use in
the laboratory in Warsaw.

Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and
admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil
du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a
member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations.
Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the
author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L'Isotopie et les
Éléments Isotopes and the classic Traité' de Radioactivité (1910).

The importance of Mme. Curie's work is reflected in the numerous awards

bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees
and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together

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with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for
their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was
awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this
time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received,
jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921,
President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America,
presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.

For further details, cf. Biography of Pierre Curie. Mme. Curie died in Savoy,
France, after a short illness, on July 4, 1934.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company,

Amsterdam, 1967

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished
in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

John Dalton.
Biografía de este científico que fue el primero en
dar una base cuantitativa a la teoría atómica.
Adam zeman

John Dalton FRS (6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844)

was an English chemist,
meteorologist and physicist. He is best known for

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his pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory, and his research
into colour blindness (sometimes referred to as Daltonism, in his honour).

John Dalton was born into a Quaker family at Eagles field, near Cocker mouth,
Cumberland, England. The son of a weaver, he joined his older brother Jonathan at
age 15 in running a Quaker school in nearby Kendal. Around 1790 Dalton seems to
have considered taking up law or medicine, but his projects were not met with
encouragement from his relatives – Dissenters were barred from attending or
teaching at English universities – and he remained at Kendal until, in the spring of
1793, he moved to Manchester. Mainly through John Gough, a blind philosopher
and polymath to whose informal instruction he owed much of his scientific
knowledge, Dalton was appointed teacher of mathematics and natural
philosophy at the "New College" in Manchester, a dissenting academy. He
remained in that position until 1800, when the college's worsening financial
situation led him to resign his post and begin a new career in Manchester as a
private tutor for mathematics and natural philosophy.

Dalton's early life was highly influenced by a prominent Eagles field Quaker
named Elihu Robinson, a competent meteorologist and instrument maker, who got
him interested in problems of mathematics and meteorology. During his years in
Kendal, Dalton contributed solutions of problems and questions on various
subjects to the Gentlemen's and Ladies' Diaries, and in 1787 he began to keep a
meteorological diary in which, during the succeeding 57 years, he entered more
than 200,000 observations. He also rediscovered George Hadley's theory of
atmospheric circulation (now known as the Hadley cell) around this time. Dalton's
first publication was Meteorological Observations and Essays (1793), which
contained the seeds of several of his later discoveries.
However, in spite of the originality of his treatment, little attention was paid to
them by other scholars. A second work by Dalton, Elements of English Grammar,
was published in 1801.

Color blindness
This image shows a number 44 or 49, but someone who is deuteranopicmay not be
able to see it.

In 1794, shortly after his arrival in Manchester, Dalton was

elected a member of the Manchester Literary and
Philosophical Society, the "Lit & Phil", and a few weeks later
he communicated his first paper on "Extraordinary facts
relating to the vision of colours", in which he postulated that
shortage in colour perception was caused by discoloration of
the liquid medium of the eyeball. In fact, a shortage of colour
perception in some people had not even been formally
described or officially noticed until Dalton wrote about his own. Since both he and

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his brother were colour blind, he recognized that this condition must be hereditary.

Although Dalton's theory lost credence in his own lifetime, the thorough and
methodical nature of his research into his own visual problem was so broadly
recognized that Daltonism became a common term for colour
blindness. Examination of his preserved eyeball in 1995 demonstrated that Dalton
actually had a less common kind of colour blindness, deuteroanopia, in which
medium wavelength sensitive cones are missing (rather than functioning with a
mutated form of their pigment, as in the most common type of colour
blindness, deuteroanomaly.

Besides the blue and purple of the spectrum he was able to recognize only one
colour, yellow, or, as he says in his paper, that part of the image which others call
red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light. After that the orange,
yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an
intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow.

This paper was followed by many others on diverse topics on rain and dew and
the origin of springs, on heat, the colour of the sky, steam, the auxiliary
verbs and participles of the English language and the reflection and refraction of
light.

Atomic theory

In 1800, Dalton became a secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical

Society, and in the following year he orally presented an important series of
papers, entitled "Experimental Essays" on the constitution of mixed gases; on
the pressure of steam and other vapours at different temperatures, both in
a vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the thermal expansion of gases. These
four essays were published in the Memoirs of the Lit & Phil in 1802.

The second of these essays opens with the striking remark. There can scarcely be a
doubt entertained respecting the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind,
into liquids; and we ought not to despair of effecting it in low temperatures and by
strong pressures exerted upon the unmixed gases further.

After describing experiments to ascertain the pressure of steam at various points

between 0 and 100 °C (32 and 212 °F), Dalton concluded from observations on
the vapour pressure of six different liquids, that the variation of vapour pressure
for all liquids is equivalent, for the same variation of temperature, reckoning from
vapour of any given pressure.

In the fourth essay he remarks, I see no sufficient reason why we may not conclude
that all elastic fluids under the same pressure expand equally by heat and that for
any given expansion of mercury, the corresponding expansion of air is

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proportionally something less, the higher the temperature. It seems, therefore, that
general laws respecting the absolute quantity and the nature of heat are more
likely to be derived from elastic fluids than from other substances.

Adam Zeman
Adam Z. J. Zeman (23 de septiembre de 1957)
Neurólogo clínico inglés especializado en neurociencia cognitiva y neurología
conductual y desórdenes neurológicos del sueño. Es profesor en la Universidad de
Exeter, Reino Unido. Sus libros Retrato del cerebro y La consciencia han sido
traducidos al español. Presidente de la Asociación Británica de Neuropsiquiatría.

Se considera a Zeman uno de los más destacados estudiosos de la conciencia.

Investiga en nuevos campos de la neurología como la biopolítica, la neurociencia
social y la neuroeconomía en la que el hombre y sus aspectos biológicos tienen
rasgos irreductibles a su condición de animal social -cercano al animal político
de Aristóteles-.

Datos académicos
Zeman estudió filosofía y psicología antes de dedicarse a la medicina en la
Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Oxford. En 1996 se trasladó a
Edimburgo donde ha sido profesor e investigador en el Departamento de
Neurociencias Clínicas de la Universidad de Edimburgo. Actualmente es profesor
de neurología cognitiva y neurología del comportamiento en la Universidad de
Exeter.
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Sus investigaciones fundamentales tratan sobre la amnesia asociada a la epilepsia,
las consecuencias neurológicas y conductuales de las enfermedades neurológicas y
los desórdenes visuales.

Para Zeman 'somos más que el cerebro' aunque no podemos ser más que lo que
nos permite el cerebro ya que lo que denominamos mente emergería de la materia;
los fenómenos de la mente tienen, para Zeman, una base fisiológica en el
cerebro. Aunque el autor no se sitúa explícitamente en el emergentismo sí que
explicita en sus discursos algunas de sus ideas, frente al dualismo y al
reduccionismo.

Para el emergentismo, situado en la órbita de la Teoría de sistemas y la dinámica

de sistemas, el todo es mayor que la suma de las partes. La respuesta de lo que
somos está en el cerebro.

Para el autor la pregunta ¿qué somos?, hecha por Chaucer, puede ser respondida si
llegamos a conocer cómo funciona nuestro cerebro: “...somos lo que somos porque
llevamos dentro del cráneo este pasmoso dispositivo biológico que moldea
nuestros pensamientos y guía nuestras acciones, hecho de unos cien mil millones
de células que establecen entre sí unos cien billones de interconexiones, el sistema
más complejo de todos los sistemas hasta ahora descubiertos en el universo.

Indudablemente, el cerebro tiene que poseer la clave de la naturaleza humana:

comprenderla nos permitirá entender también muchas de las cosas que nos
intrigan acerca de nosotros mismos.” Sin embargo existen límites al estudio del
cerebro ya que la subjetividad introspectiva de la conciencia que no puede ser
estudiado directamente por la observación empírica.

La amnesia transitoria es una forma de epilepsia

Zeman y su grupo de investigación han realizado numerosos estudios sobre
amnesia llegando a la conclusión de que la amnesia transitoria es una forma de
epilepsia. Los episodios de amnesia transitoria, que suelen ocurrir al despertar y
están asociados con otros problemas de memoria, serían síntoma de cierto tipo de
epilepsia.

Professor Adam Zeman

Profile: Prof. Zeman trained in Medicine at Oxford University Medical School,
after a first degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and later in Neurology in
Oxford, at The National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, London and
Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996, as a
Consultant and Senior Lecturer (later Reader) in the Department of Clinical
Neurosciences and to the Peninsula Medical School in September 2005 as Professor
of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology. His specialised clinical work is in
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cognitive and behavioural neurology, including neurological disorders of sleep.

Between February 2003 and August 2004 he was supported by a Health

Foundation Mid-Career Award with the aim of ‘building bridges between
neurology, psychology and psychiatry’. His main research interests are amnesia
associated with epilepsy and disorders of visual imagery. He has an active
background interest in the science and philosophy of consciousness, publishing a
wide-ranging review of the field in Brain (2001; 124:1263-1289) and an accessible
introduction to the subject for a general readership (Consciousness: a user’s guide,
Yale University Press, 2002). In 2008 he published an introduction to neurology for
the general reader, A Portrait of the Brain (Yale UP).

From 2007-2010 he was Chairman of the British Neuropsychiatry Association and

he continues to run its Training Weekend for SpRs in Neurology and Psychiatry.

Broad research specialisms: Cognitive Neurology, especially memory disorders

associated with epilepsy, including Transient Epileptic Amnesia, accelerated long-
term forgetting and autobiographical amnesia disorders of visual imagery,
neurological disorders of sleep. Case studies in neuropsychiatry. Conceptual issues
in the relationship.

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