Alcohol natural history

Vaillant GE. The natural history of alcoholism. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1983. 

In museum collections, most invertebrates will be encountered as natural history specimens, which are divided into dry and wet-preserved. Those animals having a shell or tough exoskeleton, like starfish, shelled mollusks, and lobsters, may be dried after death. The tissue may be removed, but it is often left inside the shell or carapace to shrivel and dry. Wet-preserved specimens are usually fixed in a solution of formalin or some other preservative to prevent the tissues from deteriorating quickly after death. After a brief period, the specimen is usually removed from the toxic fixing solution, rinsed, and placed in a storage solution of 70% ethanol (alcohol) mixed with water. 

Galambos JT. Natural history of alcoholic hepatitis. 3. Histological changes. 

Vaillant, G. (1995), The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 

Ammann RW, Muehhaupt B, Zurich Pancreatitis Study Group. The natural history of pain in alcoholic chronic pancreatitis. Gastroenterology 1999 116 1132-1140. 

Glycerine is also of importance to the naturalist from another point of view, and therefore we touch on its value lor natural history purposes. It is known that soine animals preserved in alcohol become ir-recognizable in the course of tinie, because the alcohol dissolves the fat in the body and destroys the colour. This is particularly noticeable in the case of some beautifully coloured sea worms and fish which shrink in alcohol and entirely lose their colours. We have found that glycerine which is sufficiently diluted with water, in order that tho very watery bodies of worms end other molluscs as well as of fishes should not shrink by the absorption of the water, is eminently adaptable for the... 

Humans have used dyes to create color since the dawn of history. Until the mid-nineteenth century, all dyes were of natural origin. Many came from plants, such as indigo, a dark blue dye that was extracted from the leaves of a native East Indian plant. In 1856, the young English chemist William Perkin stumbled upon the first synthetic dye. Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine, a valuable antimalaria dmg. None of his experiments met with success. As he was about to discard the residue from yet another failed reaction, Perkin noticed that it was colored with a purple tinge. He washed the residue with hot alcohol and obtained a purple solution from which strikingly beautiful purple crystals precipitated. Perkin had no idea what the substance was or what reactions had created it, but he immediately saw its potential as a new dye. 

Over the course of human history there have been countless powerful natural and artificial drugs, but none parallel opium in its mythical status, range of uses, and longevity of interest. Indeed, no other drug has had an economic, political, and social influence comparable to opium and its derivatives. Opium is the oldest drug ever cultivated and actively pursued by the human species it even predates the fermentation of alcohol. The story of opium could fill entire libraries with historical, clinical, and anecdotal information. 

Enantiomerically pure amino adds owe their great importance among chiral compounds to the fact that not only are they among the most versatile building blocks with a rich and vast history of transformation to other products such as peptides, amino alcohols, amino aldehydes, and many others, but that most natural L-amino acids are important components of infusion solutions, health food, and animal feed preparations. For this reason, several processes exist on a large scale that are described in the following sections. 

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