Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [39]
When Al left the company a few years later to pursue freelance work, he found that his high-tech experience had in no way diminished his love of the low tech. He finally had a chunk of time to perfect his replica and to engage in a little hero worship. “Everyone else in his day was looking at small things and making them bigger,” Al explained, “but Leeuwenhoek was the first guy to look for the invisible—what’s there that can’t be seen. He started with things like pond scum.”
Al Shinn’s replica of a Leeuwenhoek microscope
“And blood, right?” I interjected. “Weren’t red blood cells among his earliest discoveries?”
That’s right, Al said.
“Well, um, do you think it would be possible for me to do that—to look at some of my blood through your microscope?” I was suddenly embarrassed that I was proposing myself as a specimen. “You know,” I added, “to see my”—I now thought it best to use the scientific term—“corpuscles? Would it work?”
His face lit up. “I’ve never tried it before. But there’s only one way to find out,” he declared, “and that’s to take the experimental approach!”
“I brought a needle,” I offered helpfully.
“Really? You brought a needle?”
“Yeah, a sewing needle. To prick my finger?”
For a brief second, nothing, then a smile swept across his face. “Excellent!
“Okay,” he added, “let’s see now, somewhere here I have some microscope cover slips . . .” And Al was off, as if he heard the pinging of a tracking device somewhere in the distant clutter. I, meanwhile, gave the Leeuwenhoekian lens a good long look.
In the year 1668, around the time he started experimenting with microscopes, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek began attending public meetings held weekly in Delft by a group of area doctors. Here he witnessed autopsies, heard lectures on new areas of scientific and medical investigation, and eventually submitted for consideration his own fledgling findings. His reports caught the attention of a participating doctor, Reinier de Graaf, who was also a member of the Royal Society of London, an association of progressive European scientists, including such illustrious figures as Sir Isaac Newton. The Royal Society had the standing practice of urging its members to write with news of their important discoveries. In 1673 Dr. de Graaf happily obliged, his great discovery being not an idea or a technique or an innovation, but a man, “. . . a certain most ingenious person here, named Leeuwenhoek.”
With introductions made, Antoni was thereafter invited to correspond directly with the society, a practice he would continue for fifty years. His many letters, written in colloquial Dutch, were translated into English and published in the Royal Society’s prestigious journal. Although his reports were often rambling, there was no mistaking the originality of the amateur’s research. What came through just as clearly was how fearless Leeuwenhoek was in attempting to see what no one had seen before. And I do mean fearless. He had wished, for instance, to watch gunpowder explode under his microscope, so he devised a contraption for viewing the fireworks up close and, although he nearly blinded himself, succeeded. In another wild experiment, Leeuwenhoek determined to answer the question, Why is pepper so hot? He mashed peppercorns, soaked them in melted snow (thought to be 100 percent pure water), and, several days later, prepared a sample for his lens. As he wrote in the spring of 1676, he fully expected to discover in the magnified pepper particles “sharp little needles,” which literally lacerated the tongue. Instead, Leeuwenhoek found something wholly unrelated—four different kinds of “little animals” swimming in the sampling. The first three were protozoans, the organisms he’d previously seen in pond water, but the fourth set of creatures darting about