History
The first few amino acids were discovered in the early 19th century. In 1806, the French chemists Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin and Pierre Jean Robiquet isolated a compound in asparagus that was subsequently named asparagine, the first amino acid to be discovered. Another amino acid that was discovered in the early 19th century was cystine, in 1810, although its monomer, cysteine, was discovered much later, in 1884. Glycine and leucine were also discovered around this time, in 1820. Usage of the term amino acid in the English language is from 1898. Proteins were found to yield amino acids after enzymatic digestion or acid hydrolysis. In 1902, Emil Fischer and Franz Hofmeister proposed that proteins are the result of the formation of bonds between the amino group of one amino acid with the carboxyl group of another in a linear structure which Fischer termed peptide.
Read more about this topic: Amino Acid
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“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)