It’s officially fall, which means it’s officially beer fest season, which means it’s the perfect time to learn about one of the world’s oldest alcoholic beverages (it’s in our DNA to drink it), how it used to be safer to drink than water (that might be a myth, but you can explore the history of water pollution at our new Downstream exhibition), and the science behind how it’s made (using an ancient chemical process called fermentation). But it’s not just beer; fermentation is also used to make wine, bread, cheese, and even lifesaving drugs like penicillin.
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Thursday, September 30, 2021
4:00 p.m.–4:45 p.m. EDT
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Nyomi Gonzalez, the Institute’s education and interpretation specialist, will lead this virtual class hosted by Varsity Tutors, where students will learn about typhoid fever in Philadelphia and what politicians did to protect residents from it.
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Thursday, September 30, 2021
6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. EDT
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Join us for our 2021 virtual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture featuring medical scientist and Nobel laureate Peter Agre, who will talk about the special role of water in biology and his transition into malaria research in the laboratory and in the field in sub-Saharan Africa where malaria remains a major killer of children.
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Thursday, October 7, 2021
1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m. EDT
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October’s JPS virtual talk features Pleese Foods founder Kobi Regev, who will talk about the creation of Pleese Cheese, a plant-based cheese worthy of topping New York pizza.
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Fermentation is the key to many of the lifesaving drugs we have today.
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An interest in the pharmacological nature of food led Jessica Zinskie, a postdoctoral researcher at Rowan University, to study the genetics of yeast and the evolution of beer.
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Illustration of a baker at work from a French book of hours, circa 1490–1500. 📷 Royal Library of the Netherlands
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Baking homemade bread anchors us to millennia-long traditions.
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Eunice Foote and Guy Callendar showed the warming effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.
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Vox’s Unexplainable podcast interviews Distillations about how Alzheimer’s research has stubbornly focused on a single theory for decades.
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Something’s Brewing
Pour yourself a cold one and browse the more than 10,000 items in our digital collections, including some very interesting materials related to fermentation:
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The Baker's Book, illustrated first volume describing the history and significance of bread and other baked goods from around the world, 1901
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Alexander Fleming holding a petri dish. 📷 Bristol-Myers Squibb Corporation
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Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928 and changed the course of medicine. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist did not realize the full significance of his discovery until fellow Nobelists and Oxford University researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Chain demonstrated in 1940 that penicillin could be used as a therapeutic agent to fight bacterial diseases. Growing enough Penicillium mold for large-scale use remained an issue until 1944, when Pfizer was able to mass produce Fleming’s “wonder drug” in giant fermentation tanks.
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Now more than ever it’s important to tell the stories of science. Help us continue this work by supporting the Science History Institute.
You can also support the Institute while shopping on Amazon at smile.amazon.com or by asking Alexa to donate to the Science History Institute.
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