“Perimortem Cesarean
Delivery” (1986), by Vern Katz, Deborah Dotters, and William
DroegemuellerIn 1986, Vern L. Katz, Deborah J. Dotters, and William
Droegemueller published “Perimortem Cesarean Delivery,” an article
in which they developed the Four Minute Rule for perimortem cesarean
sections. The Four Minute Rule states that if a pregnant woman’s
heart stops beating, physicians should begin an operation to deliver
the
fetus within four minutes and aim to have the
fetus delivered
within five minutes of cardiac arrest. Although cardiac arrest
during
pregnancy is uncommon, it can happen when pregnant women
experience trauma, blood clots, infection, or have preexisting heart
“Child Development
in the Context of Disaster, War, and Terrorism: Pathways of Risk and
Resilience” (2012), by Ann S. Masten and Angela J. NarayanIn 2012 Ann S. Masten and Angela J. Narayan published the
article “Child Development in the Context of Disaster, War, and
Terrorism: Pathways of Risk and Resilience” in
Annual Reviews in
Psychology. The authors conducted their study at the Institute
of Child Development at the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. In the article, Masten and Narayan review a number of
articles to examine and compile the research made since the
twenty-first century on the psychological impact of mass trauma,
such as war, terrorism, and disasters, on children. The goal was not
only to highlight all current research but also delineate any
Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (1976)On 1 July 1976, the US Supreme Court decided in the case
Planned
Parenthood v. Danforth that provisions of a Missouri law regulating
abortion care were unconstitutional. That law, House Bill 1211,
restricted
abortion care by requiring written consent for each
abortion
procedure from the pregnant woman as written consent of the woman’s
husband if she was married, or the written consent of her parents if she
was unmarried and younger than eighteen. House Bill 1211 also required
that physicians make efforts to preserve the lives of aborted fetuses.
Following the passage of House Bill 1211 in 1974, two physicians and
August Karl Gustav
Bier (1861–1949)In the late nineteenth century, August Karl Gustav Bier
was a surgeon in Germany who studied spinal cord anesthesia, later
called spinal block. Bier found that, depending upon the amount of
anesthesia introduced into the spinal cord, a large area of the
human body could be numbed to various degrees. Bier established a
procedure to numb individuals from the lower legs to the upper
abdomen, with the individual’s numbness ranging from them feeling
pressure on their body to them feeling nothing at all. Bier’s spinal
block was one of the first instances of regional anesthesia, or
numbing a large area of the body, as opposed to only local
anesthesia, or numbing a small area of the body. Bier’s development
of spinal anesthesia led to improved pain management during major
surgeries, including cesarean sections and amputations.
Management of
Myelomeningocele Study Clinical Trial (2003–2010)From February 2003 to December 2010, researchers of the
Management of Myelomeningocele Study, or MOMS, clinical trial
compared the safety and efficacy of different treatments for a
specific type of
spina bifida, called myelomeningocele.
Myelomeningocele, the most frequent and severe form of
spina bifida,
is a condition in which the bony spinal column does not develop
correctly, which causes an opening of the spine, exposure of the spinal
cord, and formation of a small sac containing cerebrospinal fluid.
Myelomeningocele affects 3.4 infants per 10,000 live births in the
United States and is fatal in ten percent of affected infants.
Investigators in the MOMS trial aimed to find a more successful
CRISPR Acquired Resistance Against Viruses (2007)In 2007, Philippe Horvath and his colleagues explained how bacteria
protect themselves against viruses at Danisco, a Danish food company, in
Dangé-Saint-Romain, France. Horvath and his team worked to improve the
lifespan of bacteria cultures for manufacturing yogurt and ice cream.
Specifically, they focused on bacteria’s resistance to bacteriophages,
or viruses that infect bacteria. Horvath and his colleagues found that
the bacteria used to culture yogurt,
Streptococcus thermophilus, has
an adaptive immune system that can target specific viruses that have
previously infected the bacteria. The immune system is called the
CRISPR/cas system, or the clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats/CRISPR associated protein system. Horvath and his
David Reimer and
John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy: The John/Joan CaseIn the mid-1960s, psychologist John Money encouraged the
gender reassignment of David Reimer, who was born a biological male
but suffered irreparable damage to his penis as an infant. Born in
1965 as Bruce Reimer, his penis was irreparably damaged during
infancy due to a failed circumcision. After encouragement from
Money, Reimer’s parents decided to raise Reimer as a girl. Reimer
underwent surgery as an infant to construct rudimentary female
genitals, and was given female
hormones during puberty. During
childhood, Reimer was never told he was biologically male and
regularly visited Money, who tracked the progress of his gender
reassignment. Reimer unknowingly acted as an experimental subject in
Using Digital PCR to Detect Fetal Chromosomal Aneuploidy in Maternal Blood (2007) In 2007, Dennis Lo and his colleagues used digital polymerase chain
reaction or PCR to detect trisomy 21 in maternal blood, validating the
method as a means to detect fetal chromosomal aneuploidies, or an
abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell. The team conducted their
research at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and
at the
Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. Because small amounts
of fetal DNA appear in maternal blood during
pregnancy, Lo and his team
City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1983)In the 1983 case
City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive
Health the US Supreme Court ruled that certain requirements of the city
of Akron’s “Regulation on Abortion” ordinance violated women’s rights to
abortions. Despite the legalization of
abortion in the 1973, with the US
Supreme Court case
Roe v. Wade, individual states passed legislation
regulating certain aspects of
abortion. The city of Akron, Ohio, passed
legislation in 1978 that regulated when and where abortions could be
conducted, the consent process leading up to abortions, and the disposal
"CRISPR /Cas9-mediated Gene Editing in Human Tripronuclear Zygotes" (2015), by Junjiu Huang et al.In 2015, Junjiu Huang and his colleagues reported their attempt to
enable CRISPR/cas 9-mediated gene editing in nonviable human zygotes for
the first time at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. Their
article, "CRISPR /Cas9-mediated Gene Editing in Human Tripronuclear
Zygotes," was published in
Protein and Cell. Nonviable zygotes are
sperm-fertilized eggs that cannot develop into a
fetus. Researchers
previously developed the CRISPR/cas 9 gene editing tool, which is a
system that originated from bacteria as a defense mechanism against
viruses. In their article, Huang and his team demonstrate that
