50 Years Ago

Eighty people became severely ill in Northumberland last year after eating local mussels, and along the neighbouring coast sea birds and sand eels died in great numbers. The epidemic turned out to be a case of paralytic shellfish poisoning, never previously recorded in England but common enough on the coasts of Peru, Japan, the United States and Canada. British Columbia has long been afflicted with outbreaks of the disease, and the Fisheries Research Board of Canada has just issued a booklet describing its researches into the matter … [T]here is a now considerable amount of information about the disease. The poison in the shellfish is … called saxitoxin. It is one of the most potent known poisons and 100 micrograms is thought to be the human lethal dose by oral ingestion. It probably acts directly on nerve and muscle membranes, blocking their permeability to sodium ion.

From Nature 28 June 1969

100 Years Ago

Recent research on the functions of the nervous system of man and other mammals … has revealed the fact, which had not been adequately recognised before, that many of the most archaic dispositions of the primitive nervous system have survived in the highest vertebrates, where, as a rule, they are disguised and hidden from view by the more obtrusive features that give the vertebrate nervous system its distinctive character. The need for a fuller and more accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of the earliest nervous mechanisms has thus become more insistent … For some years, … Prof. Parker, of Harvard, has been investigating the simpler types of neuro-muscular apparatus, and has published … a series of memoirs dealing not merely with structure, but also with the functions, of this system, making use of the exact methods of modern quantitative measurement to estimate and express the results of his experiments.

From Nature 26 June 1919