Hooked on Biology

  I have a small confession. This is an image of an unspecified Salmonella species, because when I searched for Salmonella enterica or typhoid in the free use image database I use, there were no results and I do not have a terrible amount of trust in Wikimedia. However, as promised, this is a long one. Buckle up.   Today, I would like to begin by writing about Queen Mary I, the first queen of England to rule suo jure (in her own right and not because she married into the royal family, aka queen regnant) better known as Bloody Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry and Catherine were married for 24 years, initially happily, and Catherine could match Henry's intellectual interests and she was a competent regent - a paragon of royalty. However, her Spanish descent did nothing to save Henry's first surviving daughter, Mary, from scrutiny when she married the Spanish King Philip II. Mary has often been painted as a murderess, similar to the Ch...

I have a list of people and a disease in mind. The list of people: Anne and Emily Bronte, Catallus , George Orwell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman, Frederic Chopin, Niccolo Paganini, Henry Purcell, Igor Stravinsky, Ringo Starr, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a couple Louis of France, Nelson Mandela, Mary Tudor, Napoleon II of France, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Anders Celsius, Dmitri Mendeleev, Friedrich Miescher, Immanuel Kant, Erwin Schrodinger, and Florence Nightingale. They are all connected by this disease. Do you know what it is? If you do, I'm very impressed. The answer I'm thinking of is tuberculosis. Overview: - TB stats - Bacterium/disease/symptoms - History + cultural significance I'm not going to start with the disease itself because ✨I feel like it✨ and also these stats will be useful for the third section. S tats According to the WHO, TB is (as of April 21, 2023)... - the 13th leading cause of death globally - the SECO...

Today, I'm talking C. botulinum and C. tetani , two members of the massive Clostridium gang. You've probably heard of these before - botulism, botulinum, or botulinum toxin, and tetanus, which is also known as lockjaw. Let's start with C. botulinum . According to Wikipedia, it produces the most dangerous toxin known to mankind, synthetic or natural. It causes foodborne botulism as well as wound botulism, infecting either through the digestive tract or an open wound. Botulinum toxin is quite dangerous, the lethal dose being 1.3–2.1 nanograms/kilogram of body mass in humans depending on which kind of toxin (there are a few produced by the group of bacteria that cause botulism, more info here ) and how they enter the body. It's a neurotoxin so it's Quite Dangerous and has typical neurotoxin effects like death, cardiac arrest, paralysis, etc. But you see, for some reason, people like to use dangerous compounds to look pretty. See radium and arsenic  for more details....