SCIENCE:

December 2011:

Professor Stefan Nahorski gave a very informative talk at the Royal British Legion at Lemon Street, entitled "Drug Discovery, a Historical and Personal Perspective". He said that records started with the 16th Century, BC Egyptian Ebers Papyrus. This recommended various cures including herbs, lizards' blood and animal excreta. By the second Century, AD the Chinese were writing about a lot of herbal treatments. In mediaeval times, disease was regarded as a punishment from God, and rituals, bleeding and purging were tried to get the poison out of the body.

Some of these treatments did more harm than good. At the end of the eighteenth Century, homoeopathy was introduced, in which very small and harmless doses of medicine were employed. In the nineteenth Century, doctors accepted the value of digitalis (from foxgloves) morphine (from poppies) and salicylic acid (from willow). Professor Nahorski went on to talk about the huge advances in drug therapy in the twentieth century. In recent years there has been increasing awareness of cell receptors that can be activated or inhibited by chemical transmitters, and a whole new generation of drugs is being designed to act on these cell receptors. It was a most interesting talk and followed by a lot of questions.

There was no Science meeting during January.

February 2012:

At the meeting on 7th February, Tony Herring spoke about Parkinson's Disease and its treament with L-Dopa. Our next meeting on 6th March at 2.00pm will feature a presentation on Beekeeping by John Barrett. Last month John did an impromtu presentation on this subject at our Photography Group, which was very informative and was well received. On 3rd April, Damian Lyall will tell us about "Forensic Science"

Tony Herring (01872) 273678.