Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Scurvy Science

150 years after scurvy had been cured, science forgot.

Well, not exactly. They thought they knew how to cure it, but they altered their practice to a method that didn't work. Turns out if you store lime juice in copper pots open to the air, the vitamin C goes away.

And it doesn't help if you don't know that vitamin C exists, and start suspecting that scurvy is caused by a bacteria.

It's scary how fragile our knowledge can be.

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