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Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943)
Harry Hamilton Laughlin helped lead the eugenics
movement in the United States during the early twentieth century.
The US eugenics movement of the early twentieth century sought to
reform the genetic composition of the United States population through
sterilization and other restrictive reproductive measures. Laughlin
worked as superintendent and assistant director of the Eugenics
Research Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold
Spring Harbor, New York, alongside director Charles Davenport.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction
Bellotti v. Baird (1979)
On 2 July 1979, the United States Supreme Court decided Bellotti v. Baird, ruling that a Massachusetts law that prohibited minors from obtaining abortions without parental consent was unconstitutional. That law prohibited minors from receiving abortions without permission from both of their parents or a superior court judge. Under that law, if one or both of the minor’s parents denied consent, the minor could petition a superior court judge who would determine whether the minor was competent enough to make the decision to abort on her own.
Format: Articles
Subject: Legal
Twilight Sleep
Twilight Sleep (Dammerschlaf) was a form
of childbirth first used in the early twentieth century in Germany in
which drugs caused women in labor to enter a state of sleep prior to
giving birth and awake from childbirth with no recollection of the
procedure. Prior to the early twentieth century, childbirth was
performed at home and women did not have anesthetics to alleviate the
pain of childbirth. In 1906, obstetricians Bernhardt Kronig and Karl
Gauss developed the twilight sleep method in 1906 to relieve the pain of
Format: Articles
Subject: Theories
The Use of Morphine and Scopolamine to Induce Twilight Sleep
In 1907, researchers Bernhardt Kronig and Carl Gauss combined the drugs morphine and scopolamine to induce twilight sleep in women during childbirth. Physicians in the early twentieth century in Germany used twilight sleep, Dammerschlaf, to cause women to enter a state of consciousness in which they felt no pain and did not remember giving birth. Twilight sleep was associated with increased use of forceps during delivery, prolonged labor, and increased risk of infant suffocation.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes
Mary-Claire King (1946– )
Mary-Claire King studied genetics in the US in the twenty-first century. King identified two genes associated with the occurrence of breast cancer, breast cancer 1 (BRCA1) and breast cancer 2 (BRCA2). King showed that mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes cause two types of reproductive cancer, breast and ovarian cancer. Because of King’s discovery, doctors can screen women for the inheritance of mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to evaluate their risks for breast and ovarian cancer.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Charles Raymond Greene (1901–1982)
Charles Raymond Greene studied hormones and the effects of environmental conditions such as high-altitude on physiology in the twentieth century in the United Kingdom. Green researched frostbite and altitude sickness during his mountaineering expeditions, helping to explain how extreme environmental conditions effect respiration. Greene’s research on hormones led to a collaboration with physician Katarina Dalton that culminated in the development of the theory that progesterone caused premenstrual syndrome, a theory that became the basis for later research on the condition.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
DONA International (1992– )
In 1992, five maternal-infant health researchers founded Doulas of North America, later renamed DONA International to train certified birth attendants called doulas to provide care to pregnant women both before and after the birthing process. Annie Kennedy, John Kennell, Marshall Klaus, Phyllis Klaus, and Penny Simkin used the term doula, derived from the Greek word for woman servant, to describe a female birthing aide who provides non-medical emotional and physical support to laboring pregnant women.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations
John Craig Venter (1946- )
John Craig Venter helped map the genomes of humans, fruitflies, and other organisms in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he helped develop an organism with a synthetic genome. In February 2001, Venter and his team published a human genome sequence after using a technique known as Expressed Sequence Tags, or ESTs. Venter worked to bridge commercial investment with scientific research. Venter founded a number of private companies, including the for-profit Celera Genomics, headquartered in Alameda, California, as well as research institutes, such as the not-for-profit J.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
The Pasteur Institute (1887- )
L'Institut Pasteur (The Pasteur Institute) is a non-profit private research institution founded by Louis Pasteur on 4 June 1887 in Paris, France. The Institute's research focuses on the study of infectious diseases, micro-organisms, viruses, and vaccines. As of 2014, ten scientists have received Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine for the research they have done at the Pasteur Institute.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations
Carl Richard Moore (1892-1955)
Carl Richard Moore was a professor and researcher at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois who studied sex hormones in animals from 1916 until his death in 1955. Moore focused on the role of hormones on sex differentiation in offspring, the optimal conditions for sperm production, and the effects of vasectomy or testicular implants on male sex hormone production. Moore's experiments to create hermaphrodites in the laboratory contributed to the theory of a feedback loop between the pituitary and fetal gonadal hormones to control sex differentiation.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Wolbachia
Bacteria of the genus Wolbachia are
bacteria that live within the cells of their hosts. They infect a
wide range of arthropods (insects, arachnids, and crustaceans) and
some nematodes (parasitic roundworms). Scientists estimate that
Wolbachia exist in between seventeen percent and seventy-six percent of
arthropods and nematodes. The frequency of the bacteria makes them
one of the most widespread parasites. In general, they are divided
into five groups, from A to E, depending of the species of their
Format: Articles
Subject: Organisms
Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (Élie Metchnikoff) (1845-1916)
Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov studied phagocytes, immune function, and starfish embryos in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mechnikov adopted the French form of his name, Élie Metchnikoff, in the last twenty-five years of his life. In 1908, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Ehrlich for their contributions to immunology. Mechnikov discovered phagocytes, immune cells that protect organisms by ingesting foreign particles or microorganisms, by conducting experiments on starfish larvae.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Victor Jollos (1887-1941)
Victor Jollos studied fruit flies and microorganisms in Europe and the US, and he introduced the concept of Dauermodifikationen in the early 1900s. The concept of Dauermodifikationen refers to environmentally-induced traits that are heritable for only a limited number of generations. Some scientists interpreted the results of Jollos's work on Paramecium and Drosophila as
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Roger Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments (1959–1968)
In the 1950s and 1960s, Roger Sperry performed experiments on cats, monkeys, and humans to study functional differences between the two hemispheres of the brain in the United States. To do so he studied the corpus callosum, which is a large bundle of neurons that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Sperry severed the corpus callosum in cats and monkeys to study the function of each side of the brain. He found that if hemispheres were not connected, they functioned independently of one another, which he called a split-brain.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
On the Generation of Animals, by Aristotle
Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals is referred to in Latin as De Generatione animalium. As with many of Aristotle's writings, the exact date of authorship is unknown, but it was produced in the latter part of the fourth century B.C. This book is the second recorded work on embryology that is treated as a subject of philosophy, being preceded by contributions in the Hippocratic corpus by about a century.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications
Mesenchyme
Mesenchyme is a type of animal tissue comprised of loose cells embedded in a mesh of proteins and fluid, called the extracellular matrix. The loose, fluid nature of mesenchyme allows its cells to migrate easily and play a crucial role in the origin and development of morphological structures during the embryonic and fetal stages of animal life. Mesenchyme directly gives rise to most of the body's connective tissues, from bones and cartilage to the lymphatic and circulatory systems.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes
HeLa Cell Line
The HeLa cell line was the first immortal human cell line that George Otto Gey, Margaret Gey, and Mary Kucibek first isolated from Henrietta Lacks and developed at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. An immortal human cell line is a cluster of cells that continuously multiply on their own outside of the human from which they originated. Scientists use immortal human cell lines in their research to investigate how cells function in humans.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies, Experiments, People, Ethics
Beal v. Doe (1977)
In the case of Beal v. Doe, tried in 1977, the US Supreme Court ruled that states could constitutionally restrict money from Medicaid from funding elective abortions. After the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, in which the US Supreme Court had ruled women have the rights to terminate pregnancies within the first trimester, the state of Pennsylvania passed legislation that restricted the use of Medicaid funds for abortion procedures. In 1977, several Medicaid eligible women who were unable to receive coverage for a non-therapeutic abortion brought a case against Frank S.
Format: Articles
Subject: Legal
Alec John Jeffreys (1950–)
Alec John Jeffreys created a process called DNA fingerprinting in the UK during the twentieth century. For DNA fingerprinting, technicians identify a person as the source of a biological sample by comparing the genetic information contained in the person's DNA to the DNA contained in the sample. Jeffreys developed the technique in the 1980s while at the University of Leicester in Leicester, UK. Jeffreys's technique had immediate applications. In forensic science, DNA fingerprinting enabled police to identify suspects of crimes based on their genetic identities.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921)
Petr Kropotkin proposed the theory of Pleistocene ice age, alternative theories of evolution based on embryology, and he advocated anarchist and communist social doctrines in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He traveled in eastern Siberia and Manchuria from 1863 until 1867, and his subsequent publications about that area's geography became authoritative until the middle of the twentieth century.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the US
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
People's Padre: An Autobiography (1954), by Emmett McLoughlin
Emmett McLoughlin wrote People's Padre: An Autobiography, based on his experiences as a Roman Catholic priest advocating for the health of people in Arizona. The Beacon Press in Boston, Massachusetts, published the autobiography in 1954. McLoughlin was a Franciscan Order Roman Catholic priest who advocated for public housing and healthcare for the poor and for minority groups in Phoenix, Arizona, during the mid twentieth century. The autobiography recounts McLoughlin's efforts in founding several community initiatives throughout Phoenix, including the St.
Format: Articles
Subject: Outreach, People, Publications, Religion
Mary Coffin Ware Dennett (1872-1947)
Mary Coffin Ware Dennett advocated for social reform in the United States in the early twentieth century, particularly regarding sex education and women's rights to access contraception. Dennett authored several publications on sex education and birth control laws. She also worked to repeal the Comstock Act, a federal law that made it illegal to distribute obscene materials through the US Postal Services.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction
George Otto Gey (1899-1970)
George Otto Gey was a scientist in the US who studied cells and cultivated the first continuous human cell line in 1951. Gey derived the cells for that cell line, called the HeLa cell line, from a woman called Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who had cervical cancer. Cell lines are a cluster of cells that continuously multiply on their own outside of the organism from which they originated. Gey developed new techniques for in vitro, or laboratory-based, maintenance of organs and hormonal tissue, created new methods for cell cultivation, and researched nutritional media, or cell food.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History (1916), by Madison Grant
In 1916, eugenicist Madison Grant published the book The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History, hereafter The Passing of the Great Race, where he claimed that northern Europeans, or Nordics, are biologically and culturally superior to the rest of humanity. Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York City, New York, published the volume. Grant claimed that the Nordic race was at risk of extinction and advocated for the creation of laws in the US to decrease the population of people he considered inferior.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications