100 YEARS AGO

An interesting paper on a familiar subject, the relation of temperature to the keeping property of milk, has reached us from Storrs, Connecticut. The view of the writer, Mr. H. W. Conn, the well-known dairy bacteriologist, is that the keeping of milk is more a matter of temperature than of cleanliness. He points out that at 50°F. milk may not curdle for two weeks, whereas at 70°F. it may keep but forty-eight hours, and at 95°F. but eighteen hours. This curdling is due to the action of bacteria, and the effect of temperature on their multiplication is surprising. Thus at 50° the ordinary milk organisms increase about 5-fold in twenty-four hours, but at 70° they may multiply 750-fold in the same time.

From Nature 28 January 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

At a conference called by the Federation of British Industries in London, on January 14, to discuss the shortage of science teachers in schools, the president, Sir Harry Pilkington, said that the national interest demands that enough science teachers of quality, for all types of educational institution, shall teach and train students in the next few years, so that our scientific and industrial leadership of the world over the next generation may resist challenges... Of the good academic men with fine personal qualities — of whom industry, research and the universities and schools must all have some — there are not enough to go round... The answer to the shortage of graduate teachers in science is that “we must make sure we are using well all the scientists we have in research and in industry and that we must somehow again make schoolmastering attractive to the young man of spirit, imagination and ambition”. How is this to be done? More and more people are coming to think that the benefits of salary and other differentials must go to good men who actually do the teaching as opposed to good organizers and administrators in the schools... There is considerable evidence, culminating in the latest report of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, to show that Great Britain is already behind some of its important industrial competitors in the application of science. To meet this situation we need not only a restoration of our former standards of science teaching but also a considerable advance on these standards.

From Nature 30 January 1954.