Britain’s Royal Society, celebrating its 350th anniversary, has released 60 historic scientific papers to the public. I found this oddity from 1666: Trials Proposed to be Made for the Improvement of the Experiment of Transfusing Blood out of One Live Animal Into Another (.pdf file). An inquiring “Mr Boyle” seems to have gotten up in front of the Royal Society and started musing about bleeding dogs, upon which occasion his colleagues encouraged him to publish, not his findings, but his questions. Yes, the entire paper consists of a list of sixteen questions Mr Boyle has about dogs and blood. “[These questions] may excite and assist others in a matter, which, to be well prosecuted, will require many hands,” writes Boyle. He can’t try them all, but he wants others to experiment and then check back in with him. Here are Boyle’s sixteen questions, paraphrased and simplified.
1. Does putting blood from a tame dog in a wild dog make it tame?
2. If you put another dog’s blood in your dog, will it still know and love you?
3. Can you transfer unusual characteristics across breeds by transfusing blood?
4. If you teach one dog to dive after ducks and give its blood to another dog, will the second dog know how to dive after ducks?
5. Will a dog’s pulse, urine, feces, or sweat be different after a blood transfusion?
6. If you feed a dog and transfuse its blood to a hungry dog, will the second dog feel full?
7. What if you don’t feed that second dog anything and just keep transfusing blood? Will it live?
8. If you give the blood of a sick dog to a healthy dog, will it become sick?
9. If you give the blood of a young dog to an old dog, will it become more energetic and youthful?
10. If you give the blood of a large dog to a small dog, will it grow bigger than normal?
11. What effect does putting medicine in with a blood transfusion have on the medicine’s action?
12. If you give a dog purging medicine and then give its blood to another dog, will the second dog throw up?
13. Do we have to stick with dogs? Do we even have to stick with warm-blooded animals?
14. Will blood transfusions change the color of an animal? [At this point, Boyle has moved away from dogs.]
15. Can you change a dog into another species with frequent blood transfusions? [Boyle thinks it might be more likely if that other animal at least looks sort of like a dog.]
16. Can you give blood transfusions to pregnant dogs, and what does it do to the pups?
[Boyle adds that he had many more ideas, but the rest of them were only fit to be performed by physicians. You know, because normal folks do blood transfusions on their dogs all the time.]
Yes, he is exhorting people to mess around rather cruelly with dogs. The dog lover in me doesn’t like this side of Mr Boyle, and I don’t think the fuzzy black spaniel-thing nuzzled in the crook of my elbow as I type thinks much of him either. That said, my impulse is to toast Mr Boyle’s curiosity and bravery. Yes, Boyle is far more courageous than I am: by writing nothing but questions, he’s laying his knowledge bare. He tells us exactly what he does not know. I don’t see a trace of ego in the man. He doesn’t preface the questions with a summary of his research or a list of his accomplishments. He doesn’t strut his conjectures. As a result, unlike most wrong guys with lab benches (as a history of science major, I’ve read a lot of ‘em), he doesn’t look silly in retrospect. He’s simply curious, though curiosity, in his case, may have killed the dog as well as the cat. What’s more, his questions reveal his intelligence. He’s really curious about two concepts: the nature of traits, innate or otherwise, and the place in the animal body where each trait resides. He proposes looking at them experimentally almost two hundred years before Darwin and Mendel’s time. His questions show observation, experience, and credibility. He’s cannily used his inquisitiveness to showcase his knowledge.
I’m going to use this. I’m going to exploit and evaluate my students’ knowledge via curiosity. It’s scary, because I’m quite sure I’m not going to be able to answer many of their questions, but I think I may be able to tell more about them by the questions they ask than by the answers they give.
(Full disclosure: I didn’t find this because I frequently check up on the Royal Society, but rather via Wired. See: Ground-Breaking Science: Very Old Papers are Both Awesome and Hilarious.)
