You may not believe it because it involves Nova Scotians at the forefront of scientific issues so important that even you - grasshopper - have heard of them once or twice.
And you definitely won't believe that these Nova Scotians did it all on their own nickel - without any government grants - working after hours : evenings, weekends and holidays.
Google the names of these Nova Scotian scientists , grasshopper , they really do exist :
Martin Henry Dawson (Dal '16) , Oswald Theodore Avery, Colin Munro MacLeod , George Craig Laurence (born in Charlottetown of Nova Scotian parents and educated at Dalhousie ('25)).
Dawson had been the first to work with DNA in a test tube, the first to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) and to observe Quorum Sensing, but that was all so yesterday, because now in 1940 he was onto something else : the first to grow enough Penicillin to inject it into the world's first antibiotic patient - a patient who survived and happily went home.
Avery and Macleod in 1940 were hard at work proving that , unexpectedly, the seeming useless DNA was actually the vital matter that held Life's genetic information.
In 1940, Laurence was busy making the world's first Atomic reactor - it failed to go self-sustaining critical (that would only happen two years later in Chicago) but he was the first to ever observe a nuclear reactor produce neutrons.
DNA, Penicillin, Atomic Energy : all in the annus mirabilis 1940, all under difficult wartime conditions and all on their own nickel : Nova Scotia Science , take a bow !
IVANY REPORT
According to the recent Ivany Report, by 2018 (the bicentenary of the founding of Dalhousie University) the province might not have much to cheer about.
Au contraire , grasshoppers .
A visionary project to mark Dalhousie's two hundred years of service would be to name an institute (dedicated to studying the effects of cosmic, earthly and man-made radiation upon DNA) after these four scientists :
the DLAM institute (pronounced as dee-lamb) --- Dawson, Laurence, Avery , MacLeod
What do you think ?
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