A Kingdom of Little Animals

16.  A Kingdom of Little Animals by Laura J. Synder, June 1, 2023 and published in The American Scholar's Summer 2023 edition.

Conor Friedersdorf selected this essay for his on-line Recommended Reading column on Sunday, June 11, 2023.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoeks discovery of microorganisms made possible the revolutionary advances in biology and medicine that continue to this age.

This long form essay begins with:  "One night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife’s bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.”"  The man is Antoni van Leeuwenhoeks and the essay traces this craftsman's interest in and discovery of "little animals", as he called them.  It ends with, amongst other things, the beneficial use of fecal transplant for the treatment of the highly infectious Clostridium difficile.

In this essay we also learn that Galileo Galilei was not the discoverer of the telescope, but rather, the improver of the telescope.  

This might be foolish of me, but I think of all the things we can do now and from where the origin of these things came. Really important stuff.  This may also be why people are so concerned about AI.  Indeed. 

 

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