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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Leeuwenhoek Anthony van. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
On one of the warm May days in 1698, a yacht stopped on a large canal near the city of Delft, in Holland. A very elderly but unusually vigorous man boarded her. From the excited expression on his face, one could guess what brought him here is not an ordinary thing. On the yacht, the guest was met by a man of enormous stature, surrounded by a retinue. In broken Dutch, the giant greeted the guest who bowed in respect. It was the Russian Tsar Peter I. His guest was a resident of Delft - the Dutchman Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek was born on October 24, 1623 in the Dutch city of Delft to Philips Antonisson and Margaret Bel van den Burch. His childhood was not easy. He received no education. The father, a poor craftsman, gave the boy an apprenticeship to a cloth maker. Soon Anthony began to independently trade in manufactory. Then Leeuwenhoek was a cashier and accountant in one of the trading establishments in Amsterdam. Later, he served as a guardian of the judicial chamber in his native city, which, according to modern concepts, corresponds to the positions of a janitor, stoker and watchman at the same time. Leeuwenhoek became famous because of his unusual hobby. Even in his youth, Anthony learned how to make magnifying glasses, became interested in this business and achieved amazing art in it. In his spare time, he enjoyed grinding optical glasses and did so with virtuoso skill. In those days, the strongest lenses magnified the image only twenty times. Leeuwenhoek's "microscope" is essentially a very powerful magnifying glass. She magnified up to 250-300 times. Such powerful magnifying glasses were completely unknown at the time. Lenses, i.e. Leeuwenhoek's magnifying glasses, were very small - the size of a large pea. They were difficult to use. A tiny glass in a frame with a long handle had to be applied close to the eye. But, despite this, Leeuwenhoek's observations were distinguished for that time by great accuracy. These wonderful lenses turned out to be a window to a new world. Leeuwenhoek was engaged in improving his microscopes all his life: he changed lenses, invented some devices, varied the conditions of the experiment. After his death, 273 microscopes and 172 lenses were counted in his office, which he called a museum, 160 microscopes were mounted in silver frames, 3 in gold. And how many devices he lost - after all, he tried, at the risk of his own eyes, to observe under a microscope the moment of the explosion of gunpowder. At the beginning of 1673, Dr. Graaff sent a letter to the secretary of the Royal Society of London. In this letter, he reported "about a certain inventor living in Holland by the name of Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, who makes microscopes far superior to those known to this day by Eustache Divina." Science should be grateful to Dr. Graaf for the fact that, having learned about Leeuwenhoek, he managed to write his letter: in August of the same year, Graaf died at the age of thirty-two. Perhaps, if not for him, the world would never have known about Leeuwenhoek, whose talent, deprived of support, would have withered away, and his discoveries would have been made again by others, but much later. The Royal Society contacted Leeuwenhoek and a correspondence began. Carrying out his research without any plan, the self-taught scientist made many important discoveries. For almost fifty years, Leeuwenhoek carefully sent long letters to England. In them, he talked about such truly extraordinary things that gray-haired scientists in powdered wigs shook their heads in amazement. In London, his reports were carefully studied. For fifty years of work, the researcher discovered more than two hundred species of the smallest organisms. Leeuwenhoek really made such great discoveries in biology that each of them could glorify and forever keep his name in the annals of science. At that time, biological science was at a very low stage of development. The basic laws governing the development and life of plants and animals were not yet known. Scientists also knew little about the structure of the body of animals and humans. And many amazing secrets of nature were revealed before the eyes of every observant naturalist who possessed talent and perseverance. Leeuwenhoek was one of the most prominent researchers of nature. He was the first to notice how blood moves in the smallest blood vessels - capillaries. Leeuwenhoek saw that blood is not some kind of homogeneous liquid, as his contemporaries thought, but a living stream in which a great many tiny bodies move. Now they are called red blood cells. There are about 4-5 million red blood cells in one cubic millimeter of blood. They play an important role in the life of the body as oxygen carriers to all tissues and organs. Many years after Leeuwenhoek, scientists learned that it is thanks to red blood cells, which contain a special dye hemoglobin, that blood has a red color. Another discovery of Leeuwenhoek is also very important: he first saw spermatozoa in the seminal fluid - those small cells with tails that, penetrating into the egg, fertilize it, as a result of which a new organism arises. Examining thin plates of meat under his magnifying glass, Leeuwenhoek discovered that meat, or rather, muscles, consists of microscopic fibers. At the same time, the muscles of the limbs and trunk (skeletal muscles) consist of striated fibers, which is why they are called striated, in contrast to the smooth muscles that are found in most internal organs (intestines, etc.) and in the walls of blood vessels. But Leeuwenhoek's most surprising and most important discovery is not this. He was the first who had the great honor to lift the veil into the hitherto unknown world of living beings - microorganisms that play a huge role in nature and in human life. Some of the most perspicacious minds have previously expressed vague conjectures about the existence of some smallest creatures, invisible to the naked eye, responsible for the spread and occurrence of infectious diseases. But all these conjectures remained only guesses. After all, no one has ever seen such small organisms. In 1673 Leeuwenhoek was the first person to see microbes. For long, long hours, he examined everything that caught his eye through a microscope: a piece of meat, a drop of rainwater or hay infusion, the tail of a tadpole, the eye of a fly, a grayish coating from his teeth, etc. What was his amazement when in the dentist on the fly, in a drop of water and many other liquids, he saw a myriad of living beings. They looked like sticks, and spirals, and balls. Sometimes these creatures had bizarre processes or cilia. Many of them moved quickly. Here is what Leeuwenhoek wrote to the English Royal Society about his observations: "After all the attempts to find out what forces are at the root (hell. - Thus, one of the great discoveries was made, which marked the beginning of microbiology - the science of microscopic organisms. Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to conduct experiments on himself. It was from his finger that blood flowed for research, and he placed pieces of his skin under a microscope, examining its structure in various parts of the body and counting the number of vessels that penetrate it. Studying the reproduction of such little respected insects as lice, he put them in his stocking for several days, endured bites, but in the end he found out what kind of offspring his wards had. He studied the secretions of his body depending on the quality of the food eaten. Leeuwenhoek also experienced the effects of drugs. When he fell ill, he noted all the features of the course of his illness, and before his death, he meticulously recorded the extinction of life in his body. During the long years of association with the Royal Society, Leeuwenhoek received from him many necessary books, and over time his horizons became much wider, but he continued to work not in order to surprise the world, but in order to "saturate, as far as possible, his passion to penetrate into the beginning of things ". “In my observations, I spent more time than some people think,” Leeuwenhoek wrote. “However, I was engaged in them with pleasure and did not care about the chatter of those who make such a fuss about it: “Why spend so much work, what is the use of it?”, But I do not write for such, but only for lovers of knowledge. It is not known for sure whether anyone interfered with Leeuwenhoek's activities, but he once accidentally wrote: "All my efforts are aimed at one goal only - to make the truth obvious and apply the little talent I have received to divert people from old and superstitious prejudices." In 1680, the scientific world officially recognized Leeuwenhoek's achievements and elected him a full and equal member of the Royal Society of London - despite the fact that he did not know Latin and, according to the then rules, could not be considered a real scientist. Later he was admitted to the French Academy of Sciences. Many famous people, including Peter I, came to Delft to look into the wonderful lenses. The published secrets of the nature of Leeuwenhoek revealed the wonders of the microworld to Jonathan Swift. The great English satirist visited Delft, and we owe two of the four parts of the amazing Gulliver's Travels to this trip. Leeuwenhoek's letters to the Royal Society, to scientists, to political and public figures of his time - Leibniz, Robert Hooke, Christian Huygens - were published in Latin during his lifetime and took up four volumes. The last one came out in 1722, when Leeuwenhoek was 90 years old, a year before his death. Leeuwenhoek went down in history as one of the greatest experimenters of his time. Glorifying the experiment, he wrote the prophetic words six years before his death: "One should refrain from reasoning when experience speaks." Leeuwenhoek died on August 26, 1723. From the time of Leeuwenhoek to the present day, microbiology has made great progress. It has grown into a widely branched field of knowledge and is of great importance for all human practice - medicine, agriculture, industry - and for the knowledge of the laws of nature. Tens of thousands of researchers in all countries of the world tirelessly study the vast and diverse world of microscopic creatures. And they all honor Leeuwenhoek, an outstanding Dutch biologist, from whom the history of microbiology begins. Author: Samin D.K.
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