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biotechnology
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smallpox
Giacomo Pylarini in Constantiople practiced "inoculation"--intentionally giving children smallpox to prevent a serious case later in life. Inoculation will compete with "vaccination"--an alternative method that uses cowpox rather than smallpox as the protecting treatment--for a century. -
corn
Cross-fertilization in corn was discovered. -
soup
Turbevill Needham heated various soups or "infusions" all of which eventually teem with life; he concluded "there is a vegetative Force in every microscopical Point of Matter..." in support of the idea of spontaneous generation. -
cultivation
Farmers in Europe increased their cultivation of leguminous crops and began rotating crops to increase yield and land use. -
smallpox vaccine
English surgeon Edward Jenner pioneers vaccination, inoculating a child with a viral smallpox vaccine. -
Treatise on the Scurvy
The British Royal Navy makes consumption of lime juice mandatory, in order to the protect its crews from scurvy. Scurvy is a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency; symptoms include extreme lethargy, tender gums, loss of teeth, and black spots on the skin. The condition is well-known – scurvy has tormented sailors from antiquity. By the eighteenth century, mariners have recognized that ships obtaining frequent resupplies of fresh food, particularly citrus, had far fewer outbreaks of the ailment -
Thomas Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population
Thomas Malthus publishes his most famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which introduces the idea of natural population control. Malthus theorizes that human populations grow exponentially until consumption needs exceeds available supplied of resources. Overpopulation then induces various natural “checks” to reduce numbers. “Preventive checks” included social and cultural adaptations – measures to delay marriage and encourage abstinence, for example – while “positive checks” are -
vaccine
Edward Jenner published his book comparing vaccination (intentionally infecting humans with cowpox to induce resistance to smallpox) to inoculation (intentionally infecting humans with a putatively mild strain of smallpox to induce resistance to severe strain of the disease). He derived his ideas from observing that people who had been exposed to cowpox were not vulnerable to smallpox. (Vaccine comes from the Latin word vaccinus - "from cows.") -
hermetically sealed
Lazaro Spallanzani described ingeniously crafted experiments using "hermetically sealed" flasks heated in boiling water to test the possibility of using heat to kill all the microbes in an "infusion" (liquid growth medium). -
A new discipline is named
German physiologist, Karl Friedrich Burdach uses the word “biology” to denote the study of life. He employs it narrowly to refer to the physical and psychological study of human beings. The descriptor subsequently appears in works by influential natural philosophers Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus. The term was coined originally by Michael Christoph Hanov, in his 1766 work, Natural Philosophy or Dogmatic Physics, but Hanov's usage bore little relation to the modern meanin
