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Franklin Paine Mall (1862-1917)
Franklin Paine Mall was born into a farming family in Belle Plaine, Iowa, on 28 September 1862. While he attended a local academy, an influential teacher fueled Mall's interest in science. From 1880-1883, he studied medicine at the University of Michigan, attaining his MD degree in 1883. William J. Mayo, who later became a famous surgeon and co-founder of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was a classmate of Mall's. Throughout his studies at Michigan, he was influenced by Corydon L. Ford, a professor of anatomy, Victor C.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Father Frank Pavone (1959- )
Father Frank Pavone, a key proponent of the Roman Catholic Church's pro-life movement, has devoted his life's work to ending abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and other techniques and procedures that he believes threaten human life from conception to death. His contributions to the pro-life movement include founding a new religious order called the Missionaries of the Gospel of Life and participating in high-profile protests and television interviews for the pro-life cause.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Religion, Reproduction
Facial Abnormalities of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
Prenatal exposure to alcohol (ethanol) results in a continuum of physical, neurological, behavioral, and learning defects collectively grouped under the heading Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) was first defined in 1973 as a condition characterized by pre- and postnatal growth deficiencies, facial abnormalities, and defects of the central nervous system. The pattern of facial defects that occur as a result of ethanol exposure during development primarily affects the midline of the face, altering morphology of the eyes, nose, and lips.
Format: Articles
Subject: Disorders, Reproduction
The Game of Life, by John Horton Conway
The Game of Life, or just Life, is a one-person game that was created by the English mathematician John Horton Conway in the late 1960s. It is a simple representation of birth, death, development, and evolution in a population of living organisms, such as bacteria. Martin Gardner popularized the Game of Life by writing two articles for his column "Mathematical Games" in the journal Scientific American in 1970 and 1971. There exist several websites that provide the Game of Life as a download or as an online game.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
Edward B. Lewis (1918-2004)
Edward B. Lewis studied embryonic development in Drosophila, including the discovery of the cis-trans test for recessive genes, and the identification of the bithorax complex and its role in development in Drosophila. He shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus for work on genetic control of early embryonic development.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Annie Wood Besant (1847–1933)
Annie Wood Besant was a social activist who advocated for women’s access to birth control as well as marriage reform, labor reform, and Indian Nationalism in the nineteenth century in England and India. In her early career, Besant was involved in various social and political advocacy organizations including the National Secular Society, the Malthusian League, and the Fabian Society. Besant gave many public lectures and authored various articles in support of secularism, workers’ rights and unionization, and women’s rights.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
John George Children (1777–1852)
John George Children described several species of insects and animals while working at the British Museum in London, England, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Children also conducted research on chemical batteries called voltaic cells and briefly studied and manufactured gunpowder. One of the species he described, the Children’s python, or Antaresia children, was used in the twenty-first century as the subject of experiments that involved the biological cost of reproduction in snakes.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
"Screening for Congenital Hypothyroidism" (1991), by Delbert A. Fisher
In his 1991 article Screening for Congenital Hypothyroidism, Delbert A. Fisher in the US reported on the implementation and impact of mass neonatal screening programs for congenital hypothyroidism (CH) from the early 1970s through 1991. CH is a condition that causes stunted mental and physical development in newborns unless treatment begins within the first three months of the newborn's life. In the early 1970s, regions in Canada and the US had implemented screening programs to diagnose and treat CH as quickly as possible after the infant's birth.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications, Technologies
Charles Robert Cantor (1942- )
Charles Robert Cantor helped sequence the human genome, and he developed methods to non-invasively determine the genes in human fetuses. Cantor worked in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His early research focused on oligonucleotides, small molecules of DNA or RNA. That research enabled the development of a technique that Cantor subsequently used to describe nucleotide sequences of DNA, a process called sequencing, in humans. Cantor was the principal scientist for the Human Genome Project, for which scientists sequenced the entirety of the human genome in 2003.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction
George Wells Beadle (1903-1989)
George Wells Beadle studied corn, fruit flies, and funguses in the US during the twentieth century. These studies helped Beadle earn the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Beadle shared the prize with Edward Tatum for their discovery that genes help regulate chemical processes in and between cells. This finding, initially termed the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, helped scientists develop new techniques to study genes and DNA as molecules, not just as units of heredity between generations of organisms.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
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
Jesse Bennett (1769–1842)
Jesse Bennett, sometimes spelled Bennet, practiced medicine in the US during the late eighteenth century and performed one of the first successful cesarean operations, later called cesarean sections, in 1794. Following complications during his wife’s childbirth, Bennett made an incision through her lower abdomen and uterus to deliver their infant. Bennett’s biographers report that his operation was the first cesarean section where both the pregnant woman and the infant survived.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
David Reimer and John Money Gender Reassignment Controversy: The John/Joan Case
In 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.
Format: Articles
Subject: Theories
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
Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves testing for specific genetic conditions prior to the implantation of an embryo in the uterine wall. This form of genetic screening has been made possible by the growth of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) technology, which allows for the early stages of development to occur in a laboratory dish rather than in vivo. The purpose of PGD is to identify what are considered to be abnormal embryos in order to select the most desirable embryos for implantation.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies, Reproduction
Weber v. Stony Brook Hospital (1983)
The New York Court of Appeals' 1983 case Weber v. Stony Brook set an important precedent upholding the right of parents to make medical decisions for newborns born with severe congenital defects. A pro-life New York attorney, Lawrence Washburn, attempted to legally intervene in the case of Baby Jane Doe, an infant born with disorders. When the infant's parents chose palliative care over intensive corrective surgery, Washburn made repeated attempts to have the New York courts force through the surgery.
Format: Articles
Subject: Legal, Reproduction
Ferguson v. City of Charleston (2001)
The US Supreme Court case Ferguson v. City of Charleston (2001) established that public hospitals couldn't legally drug test pregnant women without their consent when those women sought prenatal care at those hospitals. The court held that such searches violated the pregnant women's protections under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. The decisions also indicated those circumstances that qualified as special needs exceptions to the Fourth Amendment, and it highlighted the extent to which pregnant women are sovereign individuals in the eyes of the Court. Ferguson v.
Format: Articles
Subject: Legal
"Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells" (2005), by Leon Kass and the President’s Council on Bioethics
Human pluripotent stem cells are valued for their potential to form numerous specialized cells and for their longevity. In the US, where a portion of the population is opposed to destruction of human embryos to obtain stem cells, what avenues are open to scientists for obtaining pluripotent cells that do not offend the moral sensibilities of a significant number of citizens?
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications, Ethics
Social Implications of Non-Invasive Blood Tests to Determine the Sex of Fetuses
By 2011, researchers in the US had established that non-invasive blood tests can accurately determine the gender of a human fetus as early as seven weeks after fertilization. Experts predicted that this ability may encourage the use of prenatal sex screening tests by women interested to know the gender of their fetuses. As more people begin to use non-invasive blood tests that accurately determine the sex of the fetus at 7 weeks, many ethical questions pertaining to regulation, the consequences of gender-imbalanced societies, and altered meanings of the parent-child relationship.
Format: Articles
Subject: Reproduction, Ethics, Legal
Robert Geoffrey Edwards and Patrick Christopher Steptoe's Clinical Research in Human in vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer, 1969-1980
The biomedical accomplishment of human in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer (IVF-ET) took years to become the successful technique that presently enables infertile couples to have their own children. In 1969, more than ten years after the first attempts to treat infertilities with IVF technologies, the British developmental biologist Robert Geoffrey Edwards fertilized human oocytes in a Petri dish for the first time.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Reproduction
Libbie Henrietta Hyman (1888-1969)
Libbie Henrietta Hyman was born into a recently immigrated Jewish family on 6 December 1888 in Des Moines, Iowa. One of many siblings and daughter to parents Sabina Neumann and Joseph Hyman, who did not particularly support her interests in science, Hyman excelled in school and indulged her interests in biology in her free time. From a young age, Hyman collected and cataloged flora around her home. Despite being valedictorian of her high school class, Hyman's first job was labeling cereal boxes in a local factory.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Cocaine as a Teratogen
Cocaine use by pregnant women has a variety of effects on the embryo and fetus, ranging from various gastro-intestinal and cardiac defects to tissue death from insufficient blood supply. Thus, cocaine has been termed a teratogen, or an agent that causes defects in fetuses during prenatal development. Cocaine is one of the most commonly used drugs in the US and it has a history of both medical and illegal recreational use. It is a drug capable of a wide array of effects on physical and mental health.
Format: Articles
Subject: Reproduction, Disorders
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) is a human disorder in which an individual's genetic sex (genotype) differs from that individual's observable secondary sex characteristics (phenotypes). A fetus with AIS is genetically male with a 46,XY genotype. The term 46,XY refers to the chromosomes found in most cells of the fetus. Most cells have a total of 46 autosomes, or non-sex chromosomes, and a pair sex chromosomes, XX for genetic females, or XY for genetic males.
Format: Articles
Subject: Disorders
Marshall Henry Klaus (1927–2017)
Marshall Henry Klaus was a scientist and pediatrician who studied maternal-infant bonding in the twentieth century in the United States. Maternal-infant bonding is the psychological and chemical attachment between mother and infant. Klaus cofounded DONA International, an organization that trains birthing aides, called doulas, to provide physical and emotional support to laboring mothers. He also studied the differences between the layouts and quality of care provided in nurseries and birthing centers in different countries and compared them to those found in the United States.
Format: Articles
Subject: People