Ada Lovelace Day: Sydney Kustu

[zdashamber]

Ada Lovelace Day! When you blog about a woman in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics who has inspired you. Technically yesterday

Comments

[tavella]

What was the Most Bitter Scientist so bitter about? I long to know!

[zdashamber]

He had this idea that would save crops without any chemicals, without destroying anything... Collect the bacteria that catalyze ice crystal formation (so that bacteria can get swept up by winds as snowflakes, and cover the world), and slightly disarrange their shape so that they can't catalyze ice formation. Then spray these slightly mutated bacteria on the fields, and voila, they're the exact same thing as is there, and the spraying will put them out there in force, so they take that ecological niche from the ice plus bacteria without doing any harm, and crops don't get scarred by ice until much lower temperatures. Like the later idea of introducing mosquitos that can't carry malaria.

But this was the early 90s. Protestors trampled the fields where they were testing, and arranged a boycott of all potatoes from that area, and the farmers and administrators abandoned the idea and the whole thing came to nothing.

Most Bitter Scientist, years later.

[hunnythistle]

That's actually a pretty cool idea! Too bad things didn't work out...

Thanks for posting about cool scientists, and science stuff. I hadn't heard about the purple petunia research, or Sydney Kutsu. So of course, I spent the evening reading about divers science matters, including Rh blood factors & nematodes...