Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [11]
The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl.
The day dragged by mercilessly. Loewi spent it trying to remember the dream. He had no success, and put himself to bed early. At three in the morning the idea returned:
It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a single experiment on a frog’s heart according to the nocturnal design.
The experiment Loewi got up and performed in his laboratory before dawn is now a classic. He isolated two frog hearts. Into the first one he put Ringer’s solution, a liquid which absorbs salts from the body until their concentration in the solution matches that in the surrounding tissue. Then he stimulated the heart’s vagus nerve. As expected, the heartbeat slowed. Loewi then transferred the Ringer’s solution to the second heart, whose nerves had been removed. On receiving the liquid, and thus the first heart’s chemical salts, the second heart also slowed.
Loewi repeated the process, this time stimulating the accelerator nerve to speed up the first heart. When he transferred the Ringer’s solution, the second heart began to beat faster. The experiment was an unqualified success, and overturned – overnight – the idea that the signals that pass between nerves must be electrical in nature. Transmission between nerves was a matter of chemistry.
According to Henry Dale, with whom Loewi shared a Nobel Prize, the discovery ‘opened a new vista’ in biology. Dale took Loewi’s work and widened its scope, showing that all communication between nerves is chemical. This is the foundation on which modern neuroscience is built.
Finding inspiration during sleep is not an uncommon experience for artists; it merely speaks of the role of the subconscious. Paul McCartney woke up with ‘Yesterday’, one of the Beatles’ most haunting and enduring songs, in his head, though the dream did not provide the finished lyrics – at first, McCartney had to content himself with rhyming ‘lovely legs’ with ‘scrambled eggs’.
For scientists, dreaming a discovery seems – from the outside at least – to be much more uncommon; Loewi’s tale has been called ‘one of the most remarkable narratives of scientific discovery’. But it is not unique. The chemist August Kekulé won a Nobel Prize and made another hugely significant breakthrough after two separate dreams. The first, in 1855, occurred while he was travelling on a London bus. ‘The cry of the conductor: “Clapham Road”, awakened me from my dreaming; but I spent a part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms,’ Kekulé said. ‘This was the origin of the “Structural Theory”.’
All today’s vast chemical establishments, from DuPont to the myriad pharmaceutical companies, owe a debt to this dream because it gave Kekulé the secret of molecular structure. It is a measure of the importance of this breakthrough that the names of many of Kekulé’s contemporaries in Germany still have a resonance in modern ears. His young assistant Adolf von Baeyer went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1905 and to found the Bayer pharmaceutical company. In the years that followed Kekulé’s insight, Emanuel Merck managed to turn his father’s apothecary in Darmstadt, where Kekulé grew up, into the multinational pharmaceutical company that now supplies drugs to the world. Kekulé moved to Heidelberg to be close