Articles

Displaying 61 - 70 of 109 items.

The Mustard Operation

By Daniella Caudle

The Mustard Operation is a surgical technique to correct a heart condition called the transposition of the great arteries (TGA). TGA is a birth defect in which the placement of the two arteries, the pulmonary artery, which supplies deoxygenated blood to the lungs, and the aorta, which takes oxygenated blood to the body are switched. William Thornton Mustard developed the operation later named for him and in 1963 operated on an infant with TGA, and ameliorated the condition, at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.

Format: Articles

Subject: Technologies, Disorders

The Apgar Score (1953-1958)

By Carolina J. Abboud

In 1952 Virginia Apgar, a physician at the Sloane Women’s Hospital in New York City, New York, created the Apgar score as a method of evaluating newborn infants’ health to determine if they required medical intervention. The score included five separate categories, including heart rate, breathing rate, reaction to stimuli, muscle activity, and color. An infant received a score from zero to two in each category, and those scores added up to the infant’s total score out of ten. An infant with a score of ten was healthy, and those with low scores required medical attention at birth.

Format: Articles

Subject: Technologies, Processes

The Infant Incubator in Europe (1860-1890)

By Kelsey Rebovich

In the nineteenth century, obstetricians in Europe began to construct devices to incubate infants in increasingly controlled environments. The infant incubator is a medical device that maintains stable conditions and a germ free environment for premature infants born before the thirty-seventh week of pregnancy. Records show that physicians had used infant incubators since 1835. However, Jean-Louis-Paul Denuce, a physician who worked in Bordeaux, France, first published about incubator technology in 1857.

Format: Articles

Subject: Technologies, Reproduction

Acid Dissolution of Fossil Dinosaur Eggs

By Paige Madison

Acid dissolution is a technique of removing a fossil from the surrounding rock matrix in which it is encased by dissolving that matrix with acid. Fossilized bone, though strong enough to be preserved for thousands or millions of years, is often more delicate than rock. Once a fossil is discovered, scientists must remove the fossil from its surroundings without damaging the fossil itself.

Format: Articles

Subject: Technologies

ABO Blood Type Identification and Forensic Science (1900-1960)

By Corey Harbison

The use of blood in forensic analysis is a method for identifying individuals suspected of committing some kinds of crimes. Paul Uhlenhuth and Karl Landsteiner, two scientists working separately in Germany in the early twentieth century, showed that there are differences in blood between individuals. Uhlenhuth developed a technique to identify the existence of antibodies, and Landsteiner and his students showed that humans had distinctly different blood types called A, B, AB, and O.

Format: Articles

Subject: Theories, Legal, Technologies

George McDonald Church (1954- )

By Christopher Rojas, Risa Aria Schnebly

George McDonald Church studied DNA from living and from extinct species in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Church helped to develop and refine techniques with which to describe the complete sequence of all the DNA nucleotides in an organism's genome, techniques such as multiplex sequencing, polony sequencing, and nanopore sequencing. Church also contributed to the Human Genome Project, and in 2005 he helped start a company, the Personal Genome Project. Church proposed to use DNA from extinct species to clone and breed new organisms from those species.

Format: Articles

Subject: People, Technologies

Diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the US

By Alexis Abboud

Diethylstilbestrol (DES) is an artificially created hormone first synthesized in the late 1930s. Doctors widely prescribed DES first to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages, and later as an emergency contraceptive pill and to treat breast cancer. However, in 1971, physicians showed a link between DES and vaginal cancer during puberty in the children of women who had taken DES while pregnant. Consequently, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned its use during pregnancy.

Format: Articles

Subject: Reproduction, Technologies

A plant genetically modified that accumulates Pb is especially promising for phytoremediation (2003), by Carmina Gisbert et al.

By Ernest Nkansah-Dwamena

In 2003, Carmina Gisbert and her research team produced a tobacco plant that could remove lead from soil. To do so, they inserted a gene from wheat plants that produces phytochelatin synthase into a shrub tobacco plant (Nicotiana glauca) to increase N. glauca's absorption and tolerance of toxic metals, particularly lead and cadmium. Gisbert and her team aimed to genetically modify a plant so that it could be used for phytoremediation- using plants to remove toxic substances from the soil.

Format: Articles

Subject: Experiments, Technologies

Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer in Mammals (1938-2013)

By Zane Bartlett

In the second half of the
twentieth century, scientists learned how to clone organisms in some
species of mammals. Scientists have applied somatic cell nuclear transfer to clone human and
mammalian embryos as a means to produce stem cells for laboratory
and medical use. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is a technology applied in cloning, stem cell
research and regenerative medicine. Somatic cells are cells that
have gone through the differentiation process and are not germ
cells. Somatic cells donate their nuclei, which scientists

Format: Articles

Subject: Theories, Technologies, Processes

Ooplasmic Transfer Technology

By Dorothy R. Haskett

Ooplasmic transfer, also called cytoplasmic transfer, is an outside the body, in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique. Ooplasmic transfer in humans (Homo sapiens) is similar to in vitro fertilization (IVF), with a few additions. IVF is the process in which doctors manually combine an egg and sperm cells in a laboratory dish, as opposed to artificial insemination, which takes place in the female's body. For ooplasmic transfer, doctors withdraw cytoplasm from a donor's oocyte, and then they inject that cytoplasm with sperm into a patient's oocyte.

Format: Articles

Subject: Technologies