This month in 1939: How dead cattle led to the discovery of warfarin | Hacker News Reader

This month in 1939: How dead cattle led to the discovery of warfarin

pmlive.com

In a similar (even stranger?) vein, in the 1950s there were cyclops baby sheep related to maternal consumption of wild corn lillies. Many years later this led to discovery of the sonic hedgehog pathway and related targeted inhibitors like vismodegib and sonidegib.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine

Today I learned of the hedgehog signalling pathway, and its sonic variant. No, the OP wasn't making a subtle joke.

Was this the genesis of the game's name?

(Question is serious, but pun intended, sorry)

No. The pathway is named after the character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog

Other way around. Wikipedia has a good summary. It’s difficult telling parents that the cause of their child’s holoprosencephaly is a gene called sonic hedgehog

Very interesting. It was around the same time as the discovery of penicillin. Were there other fungal medicines discover around that time? I believe statins and Cyclosporine were discovered much later.

A chemical from the fungus needed to react with a chemical from the clover. Either we got lucky (and the cows unlucky) that the fungus grew on the clover, instead of some plant with negligible amounts of coumarin, or else there are lots of other medically interesting combinations just out there in the environment that we haven't noticed because the necessary organisms don't interact often. Given the unimaginable numbers of naturally occurring biological chemicals out there, I'm guessing it wasn't luck, and the combinatorics made it inevitable.

It's also interesting how an attempted suicide by rat poison led to demonstration of an effective treatment for overdose that eventually led to its use as a medicine.

Though, minor nit about the second paragraph: a cow is a mature female bovine. I doubt any of the investigated deaths were cows that had undergone castration.

Maybe in ordinary conversation cow is like geese. A goose is female and a gander a male of geese but most people use goose for the kind of animal.

Kids know what “cows say”, they’d look at you weird if you asked what do bulls (or cattle) say.

But as you say, a castrated cow does sound odd.

"Cows" can be a general term. (Do you suppose cowboys only ever dealt with female cattle?)

The Oxford English Dictionary specifically recognises this sense of "cows" (particularly in a U.S. context), complete with quotations that are very similar to the usage in this article:

> c. plural. Cattle. U.S.

> 1869 Overland Monthly Aug. 127/1 The ‘cow-whip’..is used only in driving the herd, which is often called ‘the cows’.

> 1930 W. M. Raine & W. C. Barnes Cattle 60 Cows, as all cattle were called regardless of age and sex, were an investment which traveled on the hoof.

Kinda makes me sad how all groundbreaking & perhaps low-hanging fruits of the fundamental sciences seem already picked. Sure, working on optimization and the layers of abstraction has its importance but man it would have been crazy for the first radio transmission or the caffeine discovery. I hope miniaturized quantum sensing would be it for our generation.

I get your point, but in this case (medicine/health) we should be happy! Sucks dying from a finger infection

Well, its all relative.

Today's technology makes it easier to analyze and discover causative agents very easily for such issues (consider how quickly we were able to identify, sequence the current coronavirus... a virus!). The harder problems lie at the edge of where our current instrumentation is able to take us.

In the article, it took several years to identify the agent that prevented blood clots, today it would take days. But there are other things that take as long because we don't yet have the technology yet.

So at every stage in humanity, the "low hanging fruits" are so only in retrospect. For the people in 1920's, this problem was definitely not low hanging : )

Don't forget... during the age of enlightenment, it was commonly assumed that everything knowable was known.

It's been 80 years and we still haven't figured out how to reliably perform loading doses (when someone is just starting out on warfarin) and to maintain stable INR (anticoagulation effectiveness, essentially) in people who take it daily. Lots of work has been done on it, but it is petering out due to the recent introduction of new anticoagulation drugs that do not require regular monitoring.

I happen to take warfarin daily, happy to answer any questions!

Accidentally discovered items/things include: vulcanised rubber and nylon. Vulcanised rubber came as a result of research being done into developing non-perishable rubber, for which vulcanisation was a solution. In contrast... nylon was discovered during research done into developing a new kind of refrigerant!

Moral of the story... dunno. Maybe solutions can come before problems?

> Accidentally discovered items/things include: vulcanised rubber and ...

I find this confusing. There was research being done into developing non-perishable rubber, and they found vulcanised rubber, which was a solution to the problem. How is that an accidental discovery?

Check this out. Goodyear had trouble with the process of adding sulfur to rubber and accidentally spilled some on his wife's stove:

http://ewmspride.weebly.com/uploads/9/9/4/7/9947971/accident...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com