SUCCINITE , FOSSILIZED RESIN REDISCOVERED: Alzheimer's and Dementia: A New Perspective on Baltic Amber

Name: SUCCINITE , FOSSILIZED RESIN REDISCOVERED: Alzheimer's and Dementia: A New Perspective on Baltic Amber
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Peter M. Barczak

2022년 10월 · Piotr Barczak

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Baltic amber fascinates thousands of tourists who come to the Baltic Sea. Small children and their parents are eager to bury the sand while looking for precious resin. It is not easy to find, and every large piece of amber found in the “cucumber season” makes headlines. Another category of amber hunters are professionals. These are people who make a living from extracting amber of jewelry value, because each piece of fossilized resin has quite a lot of value. This group is quite hermetic, and the places and methods of extraction remain in the sphere of understatement and are shrouded in a certain mystery. The aforementioned group is particularly interested in the uniqueness of Baltic amber, created by “ancient” rivers, that was already traded by Persians, Vikings and Mycenaeans. From this group, wonderful jewelry products are created. In this book, however, I deal with another aspect of Baltic amber. The initial idea was to analyze the knowledge of this fossilized resin in various aspects. The difficulty in getting to know amber is related to the multidimensionality of the issue. The problem is that science likes to specialize to be precise. This, however, limits knowledge of the issue of amber. If we deal with the question of the formation of the resin, we touch upon issues in the field of geology. This field is enough to fill many years of research and work of a scientist. You can look back a hundred thousand years ago, or into the past millions of years or tens of millions of years, which means that we delve into such vast knowledge that the life of one person may be too short to study the issue well.Then, what do we find in amber? Insects. Thousands of insects. Every geological epoch, each geological era means different families and different species of preserved insects, all of which are to be obtained, dissected, and described in scientific articles. Again, work for a lifetime, infinitely long, because we reach millions of years into the past, and not even in one specific place on the planet – we need to look through the entire planet, because it has been changing over millions of years. What about the plants? After all, they created succinite at different stages of development. What were they like? Are those plants we know today the same ones that existed millions of years ago? Further, some species have become extinct, some have evolved, some grow today in China and others in New Zealand or New Caledonia. Then there is chemistry, the compounds found in amber… Terpenes have already been counted; 40,000. And they can be found in amber. Maybe not in that number, but – since amber was found in peat, brown coal, surrounded by minerals, sediments, and rocks – it could have absorbed the catalog of chemical compounds occurring in the world of plants, trees and shrubs, and also essential oils.

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Piotr M. Barczak developed the beginnings of his passion for geology and minerals while studying in one of the most important schools of modern Silesia, Poland – the Carolinum high school in Nysa. The first rector of this school was Christoph Scheiner, a world-famous Jesuit scholar; a mathematician and an astronomer whose observations contributed to the discovery of sunspots. Nobel laureate and American biochemist Konrad Bloch also graduated from the school. The ancestors of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, the creator of the heliocentric system, also lived near the town of Nysa. It was in this environment that the author became interested in biological sciences, chemistry, geography, and physics. At that time in the field of geography, a work was already created concerning the area of the nearby foothills at the junction of the Polish and Czech mountains, which was awarded in a regional competition of high school students. The author began the next period of education in the field of engineering and economics at the University of Economics in Wrocław, majoring in chemistry. During his studies, he had the opportunity to visit places rich in minerals in Lower Silesia and the Czech Republic. Since high school, he has also been collecting mineralogical specimens. He graduated from subsequent studies in Warsaw in the field of journalism and political science before he studied at the Warsaw University of Technology in the field of engineering. Initially, the author worked as a journalist prior to starting his business, while constantly deepening his knowledge about minerals. Having his own company allowed him to develop a collection of minerals and fossils. In 2017, Piotr M. Barczak obtained a PhD in economics in the field of management in the Warsaw School of Economics. During this period, as part of his business activity, he began researching amber and plant extracts. His need to find answers to the mystery of “living resin” was supported by funding from the European Union, which, through the National Center for Research and Development in Warsaw, approved the project entitled: “Development of Innovative Bio-nutraceuticals Based on Gypsywort and Natural Sources of Iodine”.