It is very interesting to note that great ideas most often
revolve around sleep. It comes when we are in half sleep or in dreams during
sleep or during abrupt wake up or strikes you when you are fresh up from a good
night sleep.
I’ve been reading up on life of Otto Loewi and a real
incident in his research life gave needed support to my crazy assumption... Let me transport you back to 1903, then many experts
thought nerve impulses were transmitted electrically, like telegraph signals.
Otto Loewi (1873-1961), a German-born pharmacologist, barely 20 years in age
thought otherwise... he bet on chemical transmission.
He went about his work and after 17 long years, he had a
rocking dream... let us hear it in his words:
"The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke,
turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then
I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o'clock in the morning that during
the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to
decipher the scribble.
The next night, at 3 o'clock, the idea returned. It was the
design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical
transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately,
went to the laboratory, and performed a single experiment on a frog's heart
according to the nocturnal design."
Then Dr. Otto Loewi took 10 more years to satisfy all his
critics by doing and proving. And that dream at 3AM gave Loewi a Nobel Prize
for medicine in 1936.
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