Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

hi appleboy

taking cue from Bill.....

Wilhem Rontgen, while experimenting with X-ray, used his wife's palm as the first object to be X-rayed. once he developed the film he found that only the bones, not flesh, of his wife' palm are visible, but interestingly there was also the image of the gold wedding band on her ring finger that was also visible. So Rontgen discovered that X-ray can pass through all flesh but could not pass thru' bones and metal.

from then onwards a lot has evolved for X-ray machines and to diagnose for any internal physical problem, X-ray is used.

hope that helps.

cheers!!

some more........

MICRO-ORGANISMS:
In the late 1600s, when microscopes were new, Dutch lens maker Antoni van Leeuwenhoek scraped some plaque off his own teeth and looked at it through a microscope. Gasp! It was crawling with "animalcules." In fact, tiny creatures invisible to the naked eye abounded everywhere, he found.

ANTIBIOTICS:
One of the most important medical advances in history, Antibiotics, began by accident. On the morning of September 3rd, 1928, Professor Alexander Fleming was having a clear up of his cluttered laboratory. He was sorting through a number of glass plates which had previously been coated with staphyloccus bacteria as part of research Fleming was doing. One of the plates had mould on it. The mould was in the shape of a ring and the area around the ring seemed to be free of the bacteria staphyloccus. The mould was penicillium notatum. Fleming had a life long interest in ways of killing off bacteria and he concluded that the bacteria on the plate around the ring had been killed off by some substance that had come from the mould.

Further research on the mould found that it could kill other bacteria and that it could be given to small animals without any side-effects. However, within a year, Fleming had moved onto other medical issues and it was ten years later that Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, working at Oxford University, isolated the bacteria-killing substance found in the mould - penicillin.

IN 1941, a doctor, Charles Fletcher, at a hospital in Oxford had heard of their work. He had a patient who was near to death as a result of bacteria getting into a wound. Fletcher used some of Chain’s and Florey’s penicillin on the patient and the wound made a spectacular recovery. Unfortunately, Fletcher did not have enough penicillin to fully rid the patient’s body of bacteria and he died a few weeks later as the bacteria took a hold. However, penicillin had shown what it could do on what had been a lost cause. The only reason the patient did not survive was because they did not have enough of the drug - not that it did not work.

Florey got an American drugs company to mass produce it and by D-Day, enough was available to treat all the bacterial infections that broke out among the troops. Penicillin got nicknamed "the wonder drug" and in 1945 Fleming, Chain and Florey were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Cheers!!