"National
Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference Statement
September 22–24, 1980” (1980), by the National Institutes of
Health"In 1980 the US
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the
US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
released a report titled, “National Institutes of Health Consensus
Development Conference Statement September 22–24, 1980.” The report
lists recommendations for birth delivery through cesarean sections,
a surgical procedure used to deliver the
fetus via the pregnant
woman’s abdomen. The recommendations arose from the 1980 Consensus
Development Conference on Cesarean Childbirth in Bethesda, Maryland.
Harald zur Hausen (1936–)
Harald zur Hausen studied viruses and discovered that certain strains
of the human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease,
can cause cervical cancer, in Europe during the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Zur Hausen spent his research career
identifying the viruses that cause diseases, particularly
cancer-causing viruses (oncoviruses). He primarily focused on HPV and
cervical cancer. Zur Hausen hypothesized that HPV was cancerous and
discovered that two strains, HPV 16 and 18, caused cervical cancer.
That discovery led to improved diagnosis of cervical cancer and the
later development of the HPV vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix. In 2008,
zur Hausen won the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
"Altruism and the Origin of the Worker Caste" from The Ants (1990), by Bert Hölldobler and Edward Osborne Wilson
In "Altruism and the Origin of the Worker Caste," Bert Hölldobler and Edward Osborne Wilson explore the evolutionary origins of worker ants. "Altruism and the Origin of the Worker Caste" is the fourth chapter of Hölldobler and Wilson's book,
The Ants, which was published by The Belknap Press of
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1990. In "Altruism and the Origin of the Worker Caste," Hölldobler and Wilson evaluate various explanations for how a non-reproductive caste of ant evolved. Their investigation into the evolutionary origins of worker ants synthesized research on the reproductive practices of ants to provide an analysis of how sterile groups of organisms persist in a population.
William Stewart Halsted (1852-1922)William Stewart Halsted was a surgeon at
Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, Maryland, during the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1894
Halsted described his procedure for treating breast cancer by removing
the breast tissue, chest muscles, and lymph nodes in the armpit, a
procedure he named radical mastectomy, and that became the standard of
care for treating breast cancer until 1970. He also made contributions
to other novel medical procedures such as gallbladder surgery, blood
transfusions, antiseptic techniques, anesthesia use, and using plates
and screws to hold bones in position when setting bone fractures. At
"A Proposal for a New Method of Evaluation of the Newborn Infant" (1953), by Virginia Apgar"In 1953, Virginia Apgar published the article "A Proposal for a New
Method for Evaluation of the Newborn Infant" about her method for
scoring newborn infants directly after birth to assess their health and
whether medical intervention was necessary. Apgar worked at the
Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, New York, as an obstetrical
anesthesiologist, a physician who administers pain medication during
childbirth. In that capacity, she sought to reestablish clear scoring
guidelines for newborn infants so that she could compare which obstetric
practices, pain relief methods, and resuscitation methods worked the
best during and after childbirth. She published her article in
Current
Researches in Anesthesia and Analgesia in 1953, and the Apgar scoring
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James Young Simpson was one of the first obstetricians to administer anesthesia during childbirth in nineteenth century Scotland. Before his work in the 1800s, physicians had few ways to reduce the pain of childbirth. Simpson experimented with the use of ether and chloroform, both gaseous chemicals, to temporarily relieve pain. He found that those chemicals both successfully inhibited the pain women felt during childbirth and pain during other surgeries. Patients under the influence of chloroform fell asleep and were unaware of the intense pain of childbirth. Simpson’s work was not popular for a variety of reasons, and the major claim against his practice being that pregnant women should not receive a form of pain relief during labor and childbirth. Against common beliefs at the time, Simpson advocated in favor of using anesthetics for pain-free labor, which later became the standard for surgical procedures and childbirth.
Edgar Allen (1892–1943)
Edgar Allen identified and outlined the role of female
sex hormones and discovered
estrogen in the early 1900s in the US.
In 1923, Allen, through his research with mice, isolated the
primary ovarian
hormone, later renamed
estrogen, from ovarian
follicles and tested its effect through injections in the uterine
tissues of mice. Allen's work on
estrogen, enabled researchers to
further study
hormones and the endocrine system.
A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery,
(1752-1764) by William SmellieA Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery is a
three volume collection of patient accounts that William Smellie
published from 1752 to 1764. Smellie, a physician and instructor in
obstetrics in Great Britain, published these compilations to share
his expertise in reproductive medicine, while also providing his
students and colleagues with a source of reference in their own
medical practices. Smellie wrote these books to shift obstetrics
from a discipline practiced by midwives with limited medical
training to one practiced in a medical context by physicians.
Throughout his books, Smellie describes effective and ineffective
treatments, tools, and interventions for complications during
pregnancy. Due to the popularity of Smellie's writings, access
Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA: A History of "The Most Beautiful <a href="/search?text=Experiment" title="" class="lexicon-term">Experiment</a> in Biology" (2001), by Frederic Lawrence HolmesIn 2001,
Yale University Press published Frederic Lawrence Holmes'
book,
Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA: A History of "The
Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology" (Replication of DNA), which
chronicles the 1950s debate about how DNA replicates. That experiment
verified that DNA replicates semi-conservatively as originally proposed
by Watson and Crick. Rather than focusing solely on experiments and
findings, Holmes's book presents the investigative processes of
Franklin William Stahl (1929– )Franklin William Stahl studied DNA replication, bacteriophages, and genetic recombination in the US during the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With his colleague Matthew Meselson, Stahl performed an experiment called the Meselson-Stahl experiment, which provided evidence for a process called semi-conservative DNA replication. Semi-conservative replication is a process in which each strand of a parental DNA double helix serves as a template for newly replicated daughter strands, so that one parental strand is conserved in every daughter double helix.
