You want me to snort WHAT…(Second Post)

So, I decided to do a second blog post this week because of a very interesting lecture Dr. Thompson gave my class on Thursday. I am in Dr. Thompson’s Instrumental Analytical Chemistry class. He was explaining to us Electrophoresis, which is something we are all very familiar with. Electrophoresis is a method that was originally used to separate proteins. Next, scientists used electrophoresis to figure out the sequences of the protein, they did this using gel. Later, they used electrophoresis to separate DNA and then finally they used it to sequence DNA.  However, before he went into detail of this process, he decided to give us a little background which I found very interesting. The reason I found this lecture so interesting is because it included a relationship between small pox and electrophoresis.

This background included the researcher who first used electrophoresis for separating proteins. He was not the first researcher to USE electrophoresis, but he was the first to use it in order to separate proteins. His name was Arne Tiselius. Before I talk about him, I want to first talk about how and why he began his research.

Smallpox has a really long history. Researchers have been able to track smallpox back to over 3,000 years ago. They found the rash that smallpox gives you on mummies. By the 18^th century, smallpox killed over 400,000 people in Europe every year. Smallpox was getting out of hand and something needed to be done.

Smallpox wasn’t always lethal. Some people got smallpox and it was deadly, but others survived because they had a less severe case of the deadly disease. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of the lucky ones who survived this deadly disease. She is also the woman who changed people’s life in England. While she was in Turkey she saw doctors harvest scabs from someone who was sick but not THAT sick. They took these scabs and blew it up someone’s nose who did not have the disease. This person would get sick with the minor form and therefore live. Once this happened, that person never got the bad case of smallpox because they were protected. She brought this technique back to England where it was first tested on death row prisoners. Once it was proven to work, doctors began to administer this “vaccination”.

Although this worked for smallpox, what do you do if there isn’t a less severe type of disease? How do we protect ourselves from things like anthrax? Well, Louis Pasture was the first to take on this task. He decided to see if he could protect people from anthrax. To do this, he took anthrax and added a strong oxidizing agent. The mixture of the two partially destroyed anthrax. This experiment had the same effect and protected people if they got this destroyed version of anthrax injected into them. 

These techniques intrigued many scientists all over. They wanted to know HOW this worked, why did giving us something harmful actually allow our body to protect us? These questions are what fueled Arne Tiselius’ research. He hypothesized that different ions in blood and different proteins in blood move at different speeds in electrodes and this would provide a mechanism to separate one type of protein from another. This made him wonder if there were specific ions in the blood that protect us from disease. After his research he did conclude that ions play a very important role in protecting our bodies from disease. He was able to see this by separating these ions from each other using Electrophoresis.

I could go into detail behind the electrophoresis work that Tiselius did, but that will have to be another blog because this one is long enough. Moral of this blog is SCIENCE is AWESOME and we can thank those brave people in Turkey who thought, “Maybe if I snort some scabs I won’t die from smallpox”, for vaccinations. AND we can thank Tiselius for figuring out how our body works and why immunizations protect us.

Sources:

Mainly Dr. David E. Thompson

https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_electrophoresis