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David Bruce's Microscope - Moses Howard

Page history last edited by Henry Hamburger 10 years, 7 months ago

 

 

 

David Bruce's Microscope

Moses Leon Howard

 

     In 1965 on loan to UNESCO at Uganda Technical College, I helped to train the country’s first locally on-site-trained laboratory technicians. Until then, laboratory technicians were trained and examined in London by the City and Guilds of London and other UK examining bodies. These trainees studied locally and was examined locally.  

 

     We had well equipped chemistry and biology laboratories with the exception of adequate microscopes. Raiding some high school labs, we found fifteen passable microscopes. Most had low magnification and unsatisfactory resolving power. It was a busy year with teacher and students collecting and testing the country’s milk, blood, infective tissues, microbes and fungi of every type. From classrooms, we went to the Fisheries Department and Viral Institute at Entebbe.

 

     Most trainees passed and UNESCO examiners were satisfied. The examiners, however, criticized our lack of good microscopes. But I went to our best one and called an examiner over to have a look. It was a magnificent black and gold instrument with a large barrel and clear lenses. With one look at it, I saw him focusing and refocusing it, running an appreciative hand up and down the barrel of it and calling to his fellow examiners that we had indeed made a discovery.

 

     I wanted to look into the microscope to see what he had discovered, but it was the microscope itself to which he referred. On the barrel was printed DK Bruce FRS. David Bruce, Fellow in the Royal Society. He pronounced it to be the same microscope that David K. Bruce had used in South Africa in 1801 to prove that trypanosomes carried by the tsetse fly caused nagana in cows and horses. He used it again in Uganda in 1803 to prove that trypanosomes carried by tsetse flies, glossina cause sleeping sickness in humans. 

 

It was significant: our first technicians were using that same microscope.

 

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