Sidney Q. Cohlan studied birth defects in the US during the twentieth century. Cohlan helped to discover that if a pregnant woman ate too much vitamin A her fetus faced a higher than normal risk of teratogenic effects, such as cleft palate. A teratogen is a substance that causes malformation of a developing organism. Cohlan also identified the teratogenic effects of several other substances including a lack of normal magnesium and prenatal exposure to the antibiotic tetracycline. Cohlan's experiments with vitamins and other chemicals brought attention to how nutrition and environmental agents adversely affect human pregnancy outcomes.

In July 2011, Makoto Ohnishi and colleagues published the article “Is Neisseria gonorrhoeae Initiating a Future Era of Untreatable Gonorrhea?: Detailed Characterization of the First Strain with High-Level Resistance to Ceftriaxone,” hereafter, “Untreatable Gonorrhea,” in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease, or STD, caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. In 2009, Ohnishi and a few of his co-authors found the first ceftriaxone-resistant strain of gonorrhea, called H041. That strain demonstrated resistance to ceftriaxone, one of the last remaining and effective first-line antibiotic treatment drugs for N. gonorrhoeae. In “Untreatable Gonorrhea,” Ohnishi and Colleagues confirm that the H041 strain is resistant to ceftriaxone and analyze the bacterium’s mechanism of resistance. “Untreatable Gonorrhea” was one of the first publications to characterize the H041strain and highlights a need for global public health interventions to prevent the rapid spread of gonorrhea.