History
Justinus Kerner described botulinum toxin as a "sausage poison" and "fatty poison", because the bacterium that produces the toxin often caused poisoning by growing in improperly handled or prepared meat products. It was Kerner, a physician, who first conceived a possible therapeutic use of botulinum toxin and coined the name botulism (from Latin botulus meaning "sausage"). In 1897, Emile van Ermengem found the producer of the botulin toxin was a bacterium, which he named Clostridium botulinum. In 1928, P. Tessmer Snipe and Hermann Sommer for the first time purified the toxin. In 1949, Arnold Burgen's group discovered, through an elegant experiment, that botulinum toxin blocks neuromuscular transmission through decreased acetylcholine release.
Read more about this topic: Botulinum Toxin
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)