May
7
May Café Scientifique
Posted by: Cafe Scientifique Vancouver | May 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Dear Café Scientifiquers,
Our May café will happen on Tuesday May 22th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Andrew Holding, a research scientist who is currently employed by the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. He has worked on many Science outreach projects including founding and organising Skeptics in the Pub in Cambridge, which holds monthly talks by various speakers with the aim of highlighting the application of critical thinking and scientific method. His talk will be:
Forgotten Knowledge: The discovery and loss of a cure for scurvy
Of all the slang names for the British, none is more iconic than ‘Limey’. While the the term provokes majestic images of the Golden Age of Sail, scurvy cost countless sailors and seamen their lives. It was once not unheard of for nine out of every ten members of a ship’s crew to have succumbed to scurvy by the time it returned to port. The results of James Lind’s work on the HMS Salisbury in 1747, which led to a cure, without doubt saved innumerable lives. Yet in Cherry-Garrard’s account of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole, he writes: “There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it.” So why did Lind’s results get forgotten?