Dutch scientist who discovered sperm was so grossed out he hoped his findings would be repressed — Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, was horrified by how sperm looked under the microscope
Dutch scientist who discovered sperm was so grossed out he hoped his findings would be repressed — Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, was horrified by how sperm looked under the microscope
2 comments
His post nut clarity must’ve felt horrible.
Excerpt:
>Born in 1632 to a bourgeois family in the small town of Delft (where he would ultimately spend most of his life), Leeuwenhoek made his living as a draper, selling cloth to merchants who would use it to make clothing.
>While pursuing his vocation, Leeuwenhoek became frustrated with the existing lenses and how they were not powerful enough to see threads in detail. To fix this, Leeuwenhoek designed his own strong lenses.
>In 1673, Leeuwenhoek used his new single-lens microscopes to discover bacteria and perform scientific experiments, the first time that a scientist ever knowingly interacted with the microbiological world.
>By the end of his life, he was a prosperous pillar of his community and regarded throughout the West as an intellectual giant. He owed all of this to one thing: His cutting edge microscopes and their ability to study “animalcules,” as bacteria were then called.
>His microscopes indisputably proved to humanity that it shared this planet with countless single-celled organisms.
>
>While Leeuwenhoek never wrote any books, he detailed his findings in letters published by a scientific journal known as the *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society*.
>For several years, educated Europeans marveled at the discoveries of a man who used his microscope to analyze bee stingers, human lice, lake microbes and other relatively uncontroversial organisms.
>Yet throughout this time, Leeuwenhoek would periodically be urged to examine semen. He was reluctant and stated that this was due to his religious beliefs, but in 1677 he finally relented to the pressure.
>His reaction can be best understood by what he wrote to the Royal Society about what he saw:
>>”If your Lordship should consider that these observations may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your Lordship sees fit.”
>Human civilization had a good understanding of how sex and reproduction worked long before the microscope was invented. But it wasn’t until the 17th century that anyone knew what sperm actually were, or were aware of their strange appearance.
Matthew Rozsa, 2 Jan. 2023, *Salon*.