
This month in 1939: How dead cattle led to the discovery of warfarin - onetimemanytime
http://www.pmlive.com/pharma_news/how_dead_cattle_led_to_the_discovery_of_warfarin_485464
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medymed
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine)

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

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wyldfire
Was this the genesis of the game's name?

(Question is serious, but pun intended, sorry)

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knome
No. The pathway is named after the character.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog)

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KMag
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.

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mc32
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.

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jfk13
"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.

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FredWFlintstone
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.

~~~
pm90
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 : )

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davecap1
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!

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Daub
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?

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quietbritishjim
> 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?

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foxyv
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...](http://ewmspride.weebly.com/uploads/9/9/4/7/9947971/accidental_discoveries_g6.pdf)

