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From 2012.igem.org

A chassis, really?

Metaphors aren't innocent

Historical praise to the frog as a martyr of science

The frog is kind-hearted…

Without it, would William Harvey discovered the blood flow? The cold-blooded animals like toads or frogs have a slow heart that is easier to analyze than mammals. It is by looking at them that Harvey made his first observations. In his work Motus Cordis, he assures that the blood is expulsed by the heart to the artery and goes by through the veins. “This is how I start to wonder if there was a circulatory move of the blood”. But, Harvey died before finding out what becomes to the blood between the arteries and the veins.

The lung devoted to Science…

Once again, we have to thank the frog for solving the enigma of the blood circulation. Observing under a microscope le lung of a frog, Marcello Malpighi noticed very thin blood vessels - the capillaries - that link the small arteries to the small veins.

In 1661, he wrote :

“Things are much easier to see with the frogs (…). The microscopic observation revealed things even more prodigious (…). I clearly saw that the blood got divided and circulated in tortuous vessels”

It is by crossing the lungs that the veins’ blood goes back to the arteries. But, to get this result, Malpighi admitted, even glorified himself:

“I have almost scarified the entire race of frogs, something that never happened before, even during the furious battle between rats and frogs described by Homer”.

… And sexual practices submit to scientists’ voyeurism.

Theories of “generation” – that is of reproduction – had aroused passionate quarrels. One of them was about fecundation: what part plays the man seed? The frog, as a very common animal, and reproducing quickly, has the merit of transparence… It reproduce by external fecundation, the eggs laid by the female are straight after recover by the mal seed.

Jan Swammerdam, Biblia naturae, Leyde, 1737-1738 [manuscript from 1679]