Estrella Pallas holds Leeuwenhoek's original microscope, guarded by Tomás Camacho and researcher Brian Ford, at the Royal Society in London, in front of the letters containing the first description of a protozoan, a coconut and a bacillus.
"He gives others for stamps." This is how Tomás Camacho, medical director of the Vithas Lab, from its headquarters in Vigo, explains the reason that led him to collect microscopes. In 25 years he has accumulated, together with his wife, Estrella Pallas, a doctor at the Álvaro Cunqueiro hospital in Vigo, 150. And his most recent acquisition has been, by a carom of destiny, a Leeuwenhoek: the magnifying glass of enormous quality ― it reached up to 200 augmentations― that the humble Dutch fabric merchant Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) developed in the 17th century to check the qualities of fabrics, although he ended up laying the foundations of microbiology, of which he is considered the scientific father. Of the 500 microscopes that he built, only 10 remain. Camacho's,The only one known in Spain and twin of the one kept in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden (Holland), it is going to be declared an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC).
The recovery of one of the small microscopes (barely the size of a little finger) with which Leeuwenhoek deciphered the secrets of life held by unicellular organisms - he called them "animalcules" - has been possible thanks to a sequence of hazards.
The piece that allowed us to see a red blood cell and a sperm for the first time had been under the mud of the Delft Canal for centuries, the city where the scientist was born and died.
Image of the flea, reproduced in numerous textbooks, in the original book by Robert Hooke, which is part of the Vigo couple's collection.
In 2014, the City Council dredged the canals and moved the mud to an area destined for a park.
The onlookers went there with metal detectors and someone found a cylinder with a punch, tweezers, a couple of 1665 coins and a piece that he thought was a compass.
And he posted his find on eBay.
That's where Camacho found him.
"I knew the microscope perfectly because I had bought a replica in Holland," he says.
Initially, he thought it would be a rusty copy, but began to analyze it in detail and detected “different things” than his own.
He decided to buy it "although the possibility that it was original was remote."
The seller started by asking for 50 euros and when the bid reached 100, Camacho was unmarked by bidding 1,500. “I regretted it because I was not sure, but I told my wife and she reassured me; He told me that he would deduct it from the Christmas gifts, ”he laughs. As soon as he received the order, he analyzed it under another microscope and the certainties began to arrive.
He then contacted the world's leading expert on Leeuwenhoek, British researcher Brian Ford. "I sent it to him by courier in London and he saw there was a good chance it was an original." Ford brought the microscope to Cambridge University and in June 2015 it was identified as an original Leeuwenhoek. That changed everything for the Vigo couple. Museums and scientific organizations began to ask him to exhibit it. “He has been at the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, the Contemporary Art Museum in Vigo, the Natural History Museum in Santiago, the Unesco headquarters in Paris and the Royal Society in London, in addition to the exhibitions of Vermeer of London and Moscow. He has also traveled to Holland ”, Camacho recounts the journey of the relic.
When it is not lent for exhibitions, it remains guarded in a bank's safe deposit box. The Ministry of Culture, which values it at 509,000 euros, declared it unbearable in 2019 and sent the BIC initiation file to the Xunta, which on June 13 published in the DOG the resolution for its declaration and to apply the regime of protection established by the Galician Cultural Heritage Law for BICs.
The City Council of Vigo and various institutions have shown interest in its custody and in the other of the marriage jewels: the book Micrographia, from 1665, by the English physicist Robert Hooke, on which Leeuwenhoek was based, edited by the Royal Society and considered the first
scientific
best-seller
in history. The word "cell" appears for the first time written in it and has attracted the interest of numerous Nobel laureates, including the 2014 Chemistry Award winner, Stefan Hell, one of the creators of the nanoscope.