10 Science Experiments That Changed the World

by William Harris

http://science.howstuffworks.com/10-science-experiments.htm

In 2007, the United States spent $368 billion on research and development, according to the
National Science Foundation. Nearly 18 percent of that enormous pie went to fund basic research --
the kind driven by a scientist's curiosity or interest in a scientific question. Another 22 percent went
to applied research -- research designed to solve practical problems [source: Boroush].

With so many scientists conducting so many experiments every year both in and out of the lab, it's
not surprising that most investigations enjoy little acclaim. Every so often, though, an experiment
captures the attention of scientists and laypeople alike, either because it alters our fundamental
understanding of the natural world or because it reveals a solution that addresses a serious public
health concern. You might think that such revelatory experiments are extraordinarily complex, and
you would be right about some. But just as many are stellar examples of grace and simplicity.

In this article, we'll consider 10 of the most sublime experiments, in our humble opinion. They're
organized according to the major disciplines of science -- biology, chemistry, physics and
psychology -- and span more than 200 years of inquiry. In a few cases, we've paired two closely
related experiments together in a single spot, not to hedge our bets, but to prove that science is a
collaborative endeavor.

The first of our 10 science experiments is Charles Darwin and his orchids.

10: Darwin's Flowers

Most people are familiar with Charles Darwin's
activities aboard the HMS Beagle and its famous
journey to South America. He made some of his most
important observations on the Galapagos Islands,
where each of the 20 or so islands supported a single
subspecies of finch perfectly adapted to feed in its
unique environment. But few people know much
about Darwin's experiments after he returned to
England. Some of them focused on orchids.

As Darwin grew and studied several native orchid

species, he realized that the intricate orchid shapes
were adaptations that allowed the flowers to attract
insects that would then carry pollen to nearby
flowers. Each insect was perfectly shaped and You can see how the hawk moth's long proboscis (the
red appendage) might suit it for pollinating a long-
designed to pollinate a single type of orchid, much tubed orchid.
like the beaks of the Galapagos finches were shaped
to fill a particular niche. Take the Star of Bethlehem orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale), which stores
nectar at the bottom of a tube up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) long. Darwin saw this design and
predicted that a "matching" animal existed. Sure enough, in 1903, scientists discovered that the
hawk moth sported a long proboscis, or nose, uniquely suited to reach the bottom of the orchid's
nectar tube.
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Darwin used the data he collected about orchids and their insect pollinators to reinforce his theory
of natural selection. He argued that cross-pollination produced orchids more fit to survive than
orchids produced by self-pollination, a form of inbreeding that reduces genetic diversity and,
ultimately, survivability of a species. And so three years after he first described natural selection in
"On the Origin of Species," Darwin bolstered the modern framework of evolution with a few flower
experiments.

9: Decoding DNA
James Watson and Francis Crick get the
credit for unlocking the mystery of
DNA, but their discovery depended
heavily on the work of others, like
Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, who,
in 1952, conducted a now-famous
experiment that identified DNA as the
molecule responsible for heredity.
Hershey and Chase worked with a type
of virus known as a bacteriophage.
Such a virus, made up of a protein coat
surrounding a strand of DNA, infects a
bacteria cell, programs the cell to make
more viruses, then kills the cell to
release the newly made viruses. The two Alfred Hershey in his lab in 1969

knew this, but they didn't know which

component -- protein or DNA -- was responsible until their ingenious "blender" experiment directed
them to DNA's nucleic acids.

After Hershey and Chase's experiment, scientists like Rosalind Franklin focused on DNA and
rushed to decipher its molecular structure. Franklin used a technique called X-ray diffraction to
study DNA. It involves shooting X-rays at aligned fibers of purified DNA. As the X-rays interact
with the molecule, they are diffracted, or bent, off their original course. When allowed to strike a
photographic plate, the diffracted X-rays form a pattern that's unique to the molecule being
analyzed. Franklin's famous photo of DNA shows an X-shaped pattern that Watson and Crick knew
was a signature of a helical (or spiral-shaped) molecule. They could also determine the width of the
helix from looking at Franklin's image. The width suggested that two strands made up the molecule,
leading to the double-helix shape we all take for granted today.

8: The First Vaccination

Until the stunning global eradication of smallpox in the late 20th century, smallpox posed a serious
health problem. In the 18th century, the disease caused by the variola virus killed every tenth child
born in Sweden and France [source: World Health Organization]. Catching smallpox and surviving
the infection was the only known "cure." This led many people to inoculate themselves with fluid
and pus from smallpox sores in the hopes of catching a mild case. Unfortunately, many people died
from their dangerous self-inoculation attempts.

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Edward Jenner, a British
physician, set out to study
smallpox and to develop a viable
treatment. The genesis of his
experiments was an observation
that dairymaids living in his
hometown often became infected
with cowpox, a nonlethal disease
similar to smallpox. Dairymaids
Costa Rica's entire population was inoculated against smallpox, measles
who caught cowpox seemed to be and polio in a coordinated, countrywide campaign in 1967.
protected from smallpox infection,
so in 1796, Jenner decided to see if he could confer immunity to smallpox by infecting someone
with cowpox on purpose. That someone was a young boy by the name of James Phipps. Jenner
made cuts on Phipps' arms and then inserted some fluid from the cowpox sores of a local dairymaid
named Sarah Nelmes. Phipps subsequently contracted cowpox and recovered. Forty-eight days
later, Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox, only to find that the boy was immune.

Today, scientists know that cowpox viruses and smallpox viruses are so similar that the body's
immune system can't distinguish them. In other words, the antibodies made to fight cowpox viruses
will attack and kill smallpox viruses as if they were the same.

7: Proof Positive of the

Atomic Nucleus
Physicist Ernest Rutherford had already won a
Nobel Prize in 1908 for his radioactivity work
when he began some experiments that would
reveal the structure of the atom. They relied on his
previous research showing that radioactivity
consisted of two types of rays -- alpha and beta
rays. Rutherford and Hans Geiger had determined
that alpha rays were streams of positively charged
particles. When he fired alpha particles at a screen,
they created a sharp, crisp image. But if he placed
a thin sheet of mica between the alpha-ray source
and the screen, the resulting image was diffuse.
Sometimes all it takes is a sheet of gold foil to help you
figure out that atoms have a nucleus.
Clearly, the mica was scattering some alpha
particles, but how and why?

In 1911, he positioned a thin sheet of gold foil, just one or two atoms thick, between the alpha-ray
source and the screen. He placed a second screen by the alpha-ray source to see if any particles
were being deflected straight back. On the screen behind the foil, Rutherford observed a diffuse
pattern similar to the one he saw with the mica. On the screen in front of the foil, Rutherford was
astonished to see that a few alpha particles bounced straight back.

Rutherford concluded that a strong positive charge at the heart of the gold atoms was deflecting the
alpha particles straight back toward the source. He called this strong positive source the "nucleus,"
and said the nucleus must be small compared to the atom's overall size; otherwise, more particles

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would have bounced back. Today, we still visualize the atom as Rutherford did: a small, positively
charged nucleus surrounded by a vast, mostly empty region with a few electrons.

6: X-ray Vision
We spoke of Rosalind Franklin's
X-ray diffraction studies earlier,
but her work owed much to
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, one of
only three women ever to win the
Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1945,
Hodgkin was considered the
world's foremost practitioner of X-
ray diffraction techniques, so it's Tiny crystals ready for structural analysis by X-ray crystallography
not surprising that she eventually
revealed the structure of one of medicine's most important chemicals -- penicillin. Alexander
Fleming had discovered the bacteria-killing substance in 1928, but scientists struggled to purify the
chemical in order to develop an effective treatment. By mapping out the 3-D arrangement of
penicillin's atoms, Hodgkin opened new avenues for creating and developing semisynthetic
derivatives of penicillin, revolutionizing how doctors fought infections.

Hodgkin's field of study was known as X-ray crystallography. Chemists first had to crystallize the
compounds they wanted to analyze, which was a challenge. After two different companies sent her
penicillin crystals, Hodgkin then passed X-ray waves through the crystals and allowed the radiation
to strike a photographic plate. As the X-rays interacted with electrons in the sample, they were
diffracted slightly. This resulted in a distinct pattern of spots on the photographic film. By analyzing
the position and brightness of these spots and performing numerous calculations, Hodgkin
determined exactly how the atoms in the penicillin molecule were arranged.

A few years later, Hodgkin used the same technique to solve the structure of vitamin B12. She won
the Nobel Prize in chemistry unshared in 1964 -- an honor that no other woman has duplicated.

5: Primordial Soup
Go back far enough in time, and you eventually
have to explain how the chemicals of life --
especially proteins and nucleic acids -- formed in
Earth's primordial environment.

In 1929, biochemists John Haldane and Aleksander

Oparin hypothesized independently that Earth's
early atmosphere lacked free oxygen. In this harsh
environment, they suggested, organic compounds
could form from simple molecules if they were
stimulated by a strong source of energy, either
Harold Urey, one of the two biochemists who helped to ultraviolet radiation or lightning. Haldane added
figure out how life got started

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that the oceans would have been a "primitive soup" of these organic compounds.

U.S. chemists Harold C. Urey and Stanley Miller set out to test the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis in
1953. They reproduced the early atmosphere of Earth by creating a carefully controlled, closed
system. The ocean was a warmed flask of water. As water vapor rose from the water and collected
in another chamber, Urey and Miller introduced hydrogen, methane and ammonia to simulate the
oxygen-free atmosphere. Then they discharged sparks, representing lightning, into the mixture of
gases. Finally, a condenser cooled the gases into a liquid they collected for analysis.

After a week, Urey and Miller had astonishing results: Organic compounds were abundant in the
cooled liquid. Most notably, Miller found several amino acids, including glycine, alanine and
glutamic acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which themselves are the key
ingredients of both cellular structures and cellular enzymes responsible for important chemical
reactions. Urey and Miller concluded that organic molecules could form in an oxygen-free
atmosphere and that the simplest of living things might not be far behind.

4: Making Light
When the 19th century dawned, light
remained a mystery that inspired several
fascinating experiments, most notably
Thomas Young's "double-slit experiment"
that told us light behaved as a wave, not as
a particle. But we still didn't know how
fast it traveled.

In 1878, physics instructor A.A. A.A. Michelson figured out how fast light traveled with two mirrors
Michelson devised an experiment to and a little ingenuity.
calculate the speed of light and prove that
it was a finite, measurable quantity. Here's what he did:

1. First, he placed two mirrors far apart on a seawall near campus, aligning them so that light
striking one mirror would reflect back and strike the second. He measured the distance
between the two mirrors and found they were 1,986.23 feet (605.4029 meters) apart.
2. Next, Michelson used a steam-powered blower to spin one of the mirrors at 256 revolutions
per second. The other mirror remained stationary.
3. Using a lens, he focused a beam of light onto the stationary mirror. When the light struck the
stationary mirror, it bounced back toward the rotating mirror, where Michelson had placed
an observation screen. Because the second mirror was moving, the returning light beam was
deflected slightly.
4. When Michelson measured the deflection, he found it to be 5.236 inches (133 millimeters).
5. Using this data, Michelson calculated the speed of light to be 186,380 miles per second
(299,949.53 kilometers per second).

The accepted value for the speed of light today is 186,282.397 miles per second. Michelson's
measurement was amazingly accurate. More important, scientists had a more accurate picture of
light and a foundation upon which to build the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity.

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3: Revealing Radiation
The year 1897 was momentous for Marie Curie.
Her first child with husband Pierre was born and, a
few weeks later, she went looking for a subject for
a doctoral thesis. She eventually decided to study
the "uranium rays," first described by Henri
Becquerel. Becquerel had discovered these rays
accidentally when he left uranium salts in a dark
room and returned to find that they had exposed a
photographic plate. Marie Curie chose to study
these mysterious rays and to determine if other
elements gave off similar emissions.

Early on, Curie learned that thorium gave off the

same rays as uranium. She started labeling these
Marie Curie in her lab in 1910. Curie pretty much wrote unique elements as "radioactive" and quickly
the book on radioactivity.
discovered that the strength of radiation emitted by
various uranium and thorium compounds didn't depend on the compound, but on the amount of
uranium and thorium present. Eventually, she would prove that the rays were a property of the
atoms of a radioactive element. By itself, this was a revolutionary discovery, but Curie wasn't done.

She found that pitchblende produced more radioactivity than uranium, leading her to predict that an
unknown element must be present in the naturally occurring mineral. Pierre joined her in the lab,
and they systematically reduced great quantities of pitchblende until they finally isolated the new
element. They named it polonium after Poland, Marie's homeland. Soon after, they discovered
another radioactive element, which they named radium after the Latin word for "ray." Curie won
two Nobel Prizes for her work.

2: Dog Days
Did you know that Ivan Pavlov, the
Russian-born physiologist and chemist
responsible for the salivating-dogs
experiment, wasn't interested in psychology
or behavior? The research topics that
interested him most were digestion and
blood circulation. In fact, he was studying
canine digestion when he discovered what
we know today as classical conditioning.

Specifically, he was trying to understand the

interaction between salivation and the action
of the stomach. Pavlov had already noted
how the stomach wouldn't start digesting Pavlov (L) owes that pooch a share of his Nobel Prize.
without salivation occurring first. In other
words, reflexes in the autonomic nervous system closely linked the two processes. Next, Pavlov
wondered if external stimuli could affect digestion similarly. To test this, he began flashing a light,

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ticking a metronome or sounding a buzzer at the same time he offered food to his research dogs. In
the absence of these external stimuli, the dogs only salivated when they saw and ate their food. But
after a while, they began to salivate when stimulated with external lights or sounds, even when food
wasn't present. Pavlov also found that this type of conditioned reflex dies out if the stimulus proves
"wrong" too often. For example, if the buzzer sounds repeatedly and no food appears, the dog
eventually stops salivating at the sound.

Pavlov published his results in 1903. A year later, he won a Nobel Prize in medicine, not for his
work with conditioning, but "in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through
which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged" [source:
Nobelprize.org].

1: Authority Figures
Stanley Milgram's 1960s obedience experiments
qualify as some of the most famous and
controversial science experiments. Milgram wanted
to know how far ordinary people would go in
delivering painful shocks to a peer, when
commanded to do so by a scientific authority. This is
his experiment:

1. Milgram recruited volunteers -- ordinary

residents -- to deliver the shocks. He
recruited actors to be the subjects who would
receive the shocks. The final player was the
authority figure, a scientist who would
remain in the room for the study's duration.
Stanley Milgram proved that people would turn that 2. The authority figure began each experiment
knob pretty high if an authority figure told them to.
by showing the unknowing volunteer how to
use the mock shock machine. The machine allowed volunteers to deliver up to 450 volts, a
shock labeled as highly dangerous.
3. Next, the scientist told the volunteers they were testing to see how shocks might improve
word association recall. He instructed the volunteers to shock learners (actors) for wrong
answers and to raise the voltage as the experiment progressed.
4. The learners cried out whenever they received a shock. At about 150 volts, they would
demand to be freed. The scientist encouraged volunteers to continue delivering shocks no
matter how agitated the learners became.
5. Some volunteers stopped at about 150 volts, but most kept going until they reached the
maximum shock level of 450 volts.

Many people questioned the ethics of the experiments, but the results were fascinating. Milgram
showed that average people will inflict a lot of pain on an undeserving victim simply because an
authority commands them to do so.