Science ain't what she used to be...

...and in some ways, that's probably a good thing. Yes, all the bureaucracy and ethics committees and so on get in the way sometimes, but it is a little weird to read some of the things that used to be done before such things were invented. A bit of background: the publishing arm of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK are celebrating their 350th birthday, and so have posted online a really fascinating collection of interesting papers published over all of those years here. Some of the really early ones are worth a read (if you can pick your way through some of the Ye Olde Englishe and the use of the old-style curly s that looks like an f) - like this one, for example, of which I have translated a few lines into modern spellings (but with capitalisation and punctuation maintained intact) to give an idea of what they were doing:

An Account of an Experiment made by Mr Hook, of Preserving Animals alive by Blowing through their Lungs with Bellows
(and note that 'Mr Hook' is actually Robert Hooke, as in Hooke's Law of elasticity)

I did heretofore give this Illustrious Society an account of an Experiment I formerly tried of keeping a Dog alive after his Thorax was all displayed by the cutting away of the Ribs and Diaphragm; and after the Pericardium of the Heart also was taken off. But diverse persons seeming to doubt of the certainty of the Experiment (by reason that some Trials of this matter, made by some other hands, failed of success) I caused at the last Meeting the same Experiment to be shown in the presence of this Noble Company, and that with the same success, as it had been made by me at first; the Dog being kept alive by the Reciprocal blowing up of his Lungs with Bellows, and they suffered to subside, for the space of an hour or so, after his Thorax had been so displayed, and his Aspera arteria cut off jut below the Epiglottis, and bound on upon the nose of the Bellows.

So, basically, the process of doing science doesn't seem to have changed much over the past 350 years - you do an experiment, people try to reproduce it and fail, so you have to show them again how to do it properly. Oh, and just in case you thought people are particularly much nicer to animals in modern science, this is part of the abstract I grabbed from a paper I was reading not long ago...

"Of the particulates tested, only asbestos, quarry dust, fibreglass and galena (lead sulfate) were visible in vitro. These particulates were then examined after delivery into the nasal airway of live anaesthetized mice; all were detectable in vivo but each exhibited different surface appearances and behaviour along the airway surface."

Ok, so maybe we are a bit nicer these days - the mice were at least anaesthetised before being zapped with X-rays, unlike the poor dog with a bellows attached to its lungs... So, having read that article, I'm actually now much much less inclined to complain about needing to go to an ethics committee for animal-related experiments (and yes, I'm looking into doing some work in that area, and no, it doesn't involve interactions involving concrete... I do other things as well as concrete, it's just that concrete is the main one at the moment)

The other thing to note is that the mean sentence length in scientific/technical writing does actually seem to have decreased over the past 350 years, which I must classify as being a good thing in terms of readability and comprehensibility. Having said that, though, while Hooke's writing style is a bit wordy by my standards, he does have an elegance of expression which is sadly missing in most modern science writing. See, for example, his final paragraph:

I shall shortly further try, whether the suffering of the Blood to circulate through a vessel, so as it may be openly exposed to the fresh Air, will not suffice for the life of an Animal; and make some other Experiments, which, I hope, will thoroughly discover the Genuine Use of Respiration; and afterwards consider of what benefit this may be to Mankind.

As a conclusion to a paper, that's not a bad one...