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VOLUMETRIC TESTS ON SCIENTIFIC GLASSWARE.
335 one-thousandth part of a penny per ton of output. In the other pit, where oil lamps were still used, the cost of nystagmus was about three-fifths of a penny per ton of output." Again, as to accidents: " In the colliery where they had electric lamps he found that for every 53 shifts that had been worked one had been lost through accident. In the oil-lamp pit, for every 22 shifts worked one had been lost through accident. Further, the output per shift per person had been greater in the electrically-lit pit than in the oillamp pit." Another speaker raised the question of how far nystagmus may be due to other causes besides defective lighting in the pits. Congenital nystagmus and nystagmus from blindness in infancy, as well as from other causes, are well known, but this does not affect the fact that so far as the disease is due to the miners’ vocation defective illumination is the prime factor in its causation. VOLUMETRIC TESTS ON SCIENTIFIC GLASSWARE.
THE new facilities in regard to the standardisation of laboratory glassware recently announced by the authorities of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, deserve the attention of all those engaged in scientific work. We need hardly remind our readers that the manufacture of volumetric scientific glassware is an industry which was practically non-existent in this country before the war. It has since developed satisfactorily, and the high position it has gained should never be lost. The essential point is accuracy of measurement or calibration, and in this matter the authorities at Teddington are giving British manufacturers every possible assistance in undertaking for quite modest charges the work of standardising the apparatus they make. Scientific work is clearly advanced when the instruments employed in it can be obtained with a hall mark verifying measurements. The following paragraph, taken from the Economic Review (Jan. 21st), is interesting in this
connexion :-
of appropriate foodstuffs, oxygen for the processes of combustion. removal of carbon dioxide and other waste products, and, what is now more clearly realised as an indispensable condition of cell growth and activity, a scaffolding or supporting framework. The provision of all these conditions for a cell outside the body is exceedingly difficult and represents a technical accomplishment upon which the American scientists have earned universal congratulations. The extent of the success which has already been achieved is shown by a contribution to the Journal o Experimental Medicine for December, 1919, in which Dr. A. H. Ebeling gives an account of his work in maintaining in culture a piece of connective tissue which was isolated by Dr. Alexis Carrel from a fragment of heart taken from a seven-day old chick embryo in January, 1912. This tissue has now been kept in cultivation outside the body for a period of over eight years, undergoing during the last seven years 1390 passages. The cultivation of animal tissues can in some respects, therefore, be compared to the work of the bacteriologist who keeps alive in artificial media species of bacteria which are never found the body. The difficulties are greater, but the principle is the same. It is still rather ari astonishing thing to regard the cells of the heart as individuals which may be transplanted from day to day in artificial media and maintained in what may be called a condition of robust health. From these results it would appear that in looking upon the cells of we are justified animals as potentially immortal. Their death in nature is dependent upon accidents to the complicated mechanism of which they form a part. If the manner in which these accidents occur were completely known, and could be avoided, the individual cells would certainly go on living and performing their function for periods far greater than are customarily assigned as the limits of life to the species. The principal aim of medical science is to discover the mode in which the apparatus of the vast colonies of cells is disintegrated ; and, given any measure of success in this, the work of Carrel and his colleagues affords grounds for the hope of immensely prolonging the life of man.
outside
Faulty German Thermometers. The Chemiken Zeit-acng (Dec. 30th) calls attention to the complaints current in Holland and Switzerland concerning German clinical thermometers, some of which are said to be useless. Although provided with a " test THE MEDICAL REPORT AS POPULAR EDUCATOR. certificate," these thermometers have proved quite unTHE vast difference in educative value between reliable, errors of as much as 0’5 to 1°C. being registered. The C. Z. urges that measures should be taken to maintain the reports of various medical officers of health, to the reputation of German manufactures. which we devoted a leading article in THE LANCET of Jan. 3rd, was seen to depend largely on the trouble taken to summarise the figures in readable Physical Laboratory Teddington maintain the reputation of British manufactures. form for the benefit of the lay public, and to make appropriate deductions therefrom. It was emphasised then that neglect to do this was more often THE INDEPENDENT LIFE OF TISSUES. a question of pressure of work than of unwillingness IT is now a commonplace of thought among the to trouble to make an annual survey of the local better-educated part of the community that the position in public health. Moreover, some medical bodies of animals consist of masses of cells, officers maintain that the correct interpretadifferentiated structurally and functionally to serve tion of vital statistics is an intricate and difficult the purposes of the general mass, whose indi- task best left to the biometrician, and that viduality is the summation of the characteristics their own function is confined to the accurate and activities of all the individual cells. This presentation of facts. A Memorandum (No.9 Med.) conception of the complicated structure of animals just issued by the Ministry of Health deals with finds in recent years its most striking confirmation the contents and arrangement of the annual in the fascinating work of Ross Harrison, Burrows, reports of medical officers of health for 1919, Carrel, and numerous other American investi- and should be of the utmost help towards their Directions are given as to the gators on the cultivation of tissues in vitro. The compilation. conditions which determine whether a cell can live scope and type of information desired under the in artificial culture are similar to those which various main headings, which include natural the body naturally provides. An adequate supply and social conditions of the district, sanitary
These
are
just the
measures
at
which
National is taking to
our
THE new facilities in regard to the standardisation of laboratory glassware recently announced by the authorities of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, deserve the attention of all those engaged in scientific work. We need hardly remind our readers that the manufacture of volumetric scientific glassware is an industry which was practically non-existent in this country before the war. It has since developed satisfactorily, and the high position it has gained should never be lost. The essential point is accuracy of measurement or calibration, and in this matter the authorities at Teddington are giving British manufacturers every possible assistance in undertaking for quite modest charges the work of standardising the apparatus they make. Scientific work is clearly advanced when the instruments employed in it can be obtained with a hall mark verifying measurements. The following paragraph, taken from the Economic Review (Jan. 21st), is interesting in this
connexion :-
of appropriate foodstuffs, oxygen for the processes of combustion. removal of carbon dioxide and other waste products, and, what is now more clearly realised as an indispensable condition of cell growth and activity, a scaffolding or supporting framework. The provision of all these conditions for a cell outside the body is exceedingly difficult and represents a technical accomplishment upon which the American scientists have earned universal congratulations. The extent of the success which has already been achieved is shown by a contribution to the Journal o Experimental Medicine for December, 1919, in which Dr. A. H. Ebeling gives an account of his work in maintaining in culture a piece of connective tissue which was isolated by Dr. Alexis Carrel from a fragment of heart taken from a seven-day old chick embryo in January, 1912. This tissue has now been kept in cultivation outside the body for a period of over eight years, undergoing during the last seven years 1390 passages. The cultivation of animal tissues can in some respects, therefore, be compared to the work of the bacteriologist who keeps alive in artificial media species of bacteria which are never found the body. The difficulties are greater, but the principle is the same. It is still rather ari astonishing thing to regard the cells of the heart as individuals which may be transplanted from day to day in artificial media and maintained in what may be called a condition of robust health. From these results it would appear that in looking upon the cells of we are justified animals as potentially immortal. Their death in nature is dependent upon accidents to the complicated mechanism of which they form a part. If the manner in which these accidents occur were completely known, and could be avoided, the individual cells would certainly go on living and performing their function for periods far greater than are customarily assigned as the limits of life to the species. The principal aim of medical science is to discover the mode in which the apparatus of the vast colonies of cells is disintegrated ; and, given any measure of success in this, the work of Carrel and his colleagues affords grounds for the hope of immensely prolonging the life of man.
outside
Faulty German Thermometers. The Chemiken Zeit-acng (Dec. 30th) calls attention to the complaints current in Holland and Switzerland concerning German clinical thermometers, some of which are said to be useless. Although provided with a " test THE MEDICAL REPORT AS POPULAR EDUCATOR. certificate," these thermometers have proved quite unTHE vast difference in educative value between reliable, errors of as much as 0’5 to 1°C. being registered. The C. Z. urges that measures should be taken to maintain the reports of various medical officers of health, to the reputation of German manufactures. which we devoted a leading article in THE LANCET of Jan. 3rd, was seen to depend largely on the trouble taken to summarise the figures in readable Physical Laboratory Teddington maintain the reputation of British manufactures. form for the benefit of the lay public, and to make appropriate deductions therefrom. It was emphasised then that neglect to do this was more often THE INDEPENDENT LIFE OF TISSUES. a question of pressure of work than of unwillingness IT is now a commonplace of thought among the to trouble to make an annual survey of the local better-educated part of the community that the position in public health. Moreover, some medical bodies of animals consist of masses of cells, officers maintain that the correct interpretadifferentiated structurally and functionally to serve tion of vital statistics is an intricate and difficult the purposes of the general mass, whose indi- task best left to the biometrician, and that viduality is the summation of the characteristics their own function is confined to the accurate and activities of all the individual cells. This presentation of facts. A Memorandum (No.9 Med.) conception of the complicated structure of animals just issued by the Ministry of Health deals with finds in recent years its most striking confirmation the contents and arrangement of the annual in the fascinating work of Ross Harrison, Burrows, reports of medical officers of health for 1919, Carrel, and numerous other American investi- and should be of the utmost help towards their Directions are given as to the gators on the cultivation of tissues in vitro. The compilation. conditions which determine whether a cell can live scope and type of information desired under the in artificial culture are similar to those which various main headings, which include natural the body naturally provides. An adequate supply and social conditions of the district, sanitary
These
are
just the
measures
at
which
National is taking to
our