50 Years Ago

Conferences, competitions, special postage stamps, film festivals, a youth parliament and Viking beacons will be some of the features of European Conservation Year, to be launched in the United Kingdom in the traditional way with a dinner at the Guildhall, London, on December 16. Twenty-five countries are involved in this concerted effort to communicate the need to stop spreading fear and gloom and to do something about pressures on the environment.

The highlight of the year seems likely to be the gathering of top people, including Mr Anthony Crosland, the Secretary of State for Regional Government and Planning, at the European Conservation Conference in Strasbourg next February. Later in the year there will be a large international congress in London organized by the World Wildlife Fund.

The Netherlands will have a conservation fleet and Germany a State Railways exhibition train to carry the good news from place to place. Italy is to have a film festival with a prize of a million lire for the best film on conservation, and four Scandinavian countries will light Viking warning pyres every ten miles along two thousand miles of coast; it is to be hoped that they do no harm to the environment. The youth parliament will be in Stockholm, where the Prime Minister will join the young delegates.

Special stamps are to be issued by at least fifteen of the participating countries, and most of them will be organizing competitions for schools. In Britain the Nature Conservancy and the Shell organization are to run a competition for secondary school pupils, who will be encouraged to study local problems and suggest conservation projects. The winners, after competing in public for the final honours, will be taken on a tour of Europe at the expense of Shell.

From Nature 13 December 1969

100 Years Ago

In 1915 the return to this country of large bodies of troops from the Eastern war area—many afflicted with dysentery—rendered it necessary to examine the stools of a very large number of patients in order to decide whether those returning from Gallipoli and Egypt were suffering, as was supposed (but shown to be erroneously so), from “amoebic dysentery.” A large number of trained workers were required for this purpose. Their training was undertaken, at first, by Dr. C. M. Wenyon, but when his services were required elsewhere at the end of 1915, Prof. Dobell took charge of the work and for four years has devoted himself uninterruptedly to the practical study of the intestinal protozoa of man. A large part of his time has been occupied with the routine work of diagnosis, with teaching that routine to others, and with the investigation of methods of treating amoebic dysentery. But, as he says, he has had great opportunities for studying the human intestinal protozoa from the zoological point of view, and probably no zoologist has ever before had such an immense amount of this special material at his disposal.

From Nature 11 December 1919