Chemistry of Kupipakwa Rasayanas – A Review
Kupipakwa Rasayanas are very popular and commonly prescribed preparations among the Ayurvedic physicians, and are looked upon as panacea. These are prepared in a specially designed glass bottle by gradual heating immersion in sand bath (Valuka Yantra). Particular chemical processes are involved in these preparations which also bear testimony to the great chemical knowledge prevailing in ancient India. In the present review, the probable chemistry of Kupipakwa Rasayanas has been discussed.
Enumeration of various Ayurvedic formulations listed in an ancient palm-leaf manuscript of Rayalaseema region in Andhra Pradesh state, India.
ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE
Ancient India relied on manuscripts written by scholars for storing, transferring and retrieving the information pertaining to culture, traditions, religion, geography and political issues. Similarly, Ayurveda, an ancient human health care management system in India and most of its information is available through palm-leaf manuscripts. Though each palm-leaf can persist for a fairly long time, it suffers gradual deterioration owing to physical, chemincal and biological factors, thus warranting digitiation. The palm-leaf manuscripts of Ayurveda are extensively studied for finding new drug or treatment methods to new-age diseases.


AIM OF THE STUDY
The present study concerns an unpublished ancient Telugu palm-leaf manuscript containing Ayurvedic medicine information enscripted on 33 palm-leaves. Since the palm-leaf manuscript is very old, the manual documentation, translation, digitization and analysis of it may shed light on hidden ayurvedic information that may be useful to the modern society.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
The palm-leaf manuscript with 33 folios were manually documented and digitized into a Telugu book followed by translation into English. The scientific names of historical diseases, plants, animals, metals and minerals were identified based on published sources.


RESULTS
A critical scrutiny of the palm-leaf manuscript revealed 120 formulations with 164 plants for 29 different kinds of diseases such as meha and prameha (urinary problems), eye diseases, skin diseases, respiratory diseases, fevers, digestive disorders, jaundice, tuberculosis, cancer and so on. Plant and animal products, metals and minerals mentioned in the said formulations were identified and listed.


CONCLUSION
Basing on our study, it is concluded that the said manuscript contains mono-or poly-herbo-mineral formulations for the treatment of various ailments.This information can be incorporated into and compared with available data bases to find out the effectiveness of the drug or formulation for any given diseases. Further validation of the formulations can be done by phytochemical and in vivo pharmacological assays.
Ionists in Industry: Physical Chemistry at General Electric, 1900-1915
W [HEN WILLIAM D. COOLIDGE came to Schenectady, N.Y., in 1905, he brought his bomb with him. Coolidge was not an anarchist coming to blow up the main works of the General Electric Company; he was a physical chemist with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Leipzig, coming to work at the GE Research Laboratory. His "bomb" was a thick-walled, instrumented steel cylinder designed not to blow up, but to contain and measure high pressures and temperatures without exploding. He had used it at MIT in collaboration with his senior colleague Arthur A. Noyes to study the properties of solutions under extreme conditions. Bring your bomb to our research laboratory in Schenectady, GE research director Willis R. Whitney had told Coolidge; we will let you spend one third of your time continuing that pure research, while you spend the rest of your time helping us improve light bulbs. Things turned out differently. Coolidge spent all his time on light bulbs, and the bomb gathered dust in a corner until he sent it back to MIT. He nearly went with it. "I am fully satisfied," he wrote his mother in March 1906, "that this work is not so much to my taste as investigation in pure science in connection with some college."' Coolidge stayed in industry, and learned to like it. But as the bomb story suggests, his entry was not smooth. This sense of the collision of academic and industrial values is missing from most historical surveys of early nonacademic research. Two recent review articles depict a smooth "convergence" of science and technology in the industrial research laboratory. Others speak of industrial research as "work . . . placed under the direction of men who were purely scientific in their interests," or depict industrial laboratories as indistinguishable from their academic counterparts.2 Closer examinations of individual laboratories,