Although scientific advancement is always collective, some names stand out in history because their discoveries served to save millions of lives.
If the human life expectancy has multiplied several times in the last two centuries is not by chance: the advance of science and medicine has helped us to live healthier, to keep us better and with it, to live longer. That advance of which we speak seems something general, inconcrete and faceless. After all, progress is a collective effort in which the last to reach are raised on the shoulders of the previous and where every great breakthrough has a great team behind.
But in some cases, these advances have names and faces: those of scientists who gave that little last (or first step) to the result that ended up saving lives. Some of them, compiled in the web ScienceHeroes, had so much impact that the lives that have saved count in the millions. In others, the impact is even greater and they are impossible to count.
1. Louis Pasteur: the theory of germs
Louis Pasteur emphasized at a young age his imagination, a feature that helped him to develop what would be his greatest scientific achievement: to demonstrate the theory that germs were the cause of human diseases, an idea that revolutionized medical practice and Crowned him as the founder of microbiology. In addition, this helped him to develop the method of pasteurization, a procedure used throughout the world for food preservation.
 |
| Louis Pasteur |
Microbiology gave rise to innovations as important as vaccines, antibiotics, sterilization and hygiene to avoid the spread of infectious diseases. These ideas are the basis of modern medicine, by demonstrating that a disease is the visible effect of a specific cause that can be found and eliminated through a specific treatment. It would be impossible to calculate the number of lives that have been saved thanks to the advances made by Pasteur, as well as those born from his ideas.
2. Joseph Lister: Antiseptics
The English surgeon Joseph Lister observed from his medical practice that the infection and putrefaction of surgical wounds caused a high mortality in the hospitals: between 30 and 50% of the patients died from the gangrene and other postoperative infections. Lister knew Pasteur's ideas. He knew that the French had shown that it was the arrival of germs that caused the decay of matter, and that this did not occur if it remained outside the contact of the air.
 |
| Joseph Lister |
Based on these notions, and based on testing, he developed the surgical practice of asepsis and antisepsis, which improved the recovery and postoperative survival of his patients. The development of different antiseptic processes and products, as well as the opening of this research route, has saved the lives of millions of patients undergoing surgery for more than a century and around the world.
3. Karl Landsteiner: blood groups
This Austrian pathologist and biologist discovered and classified blood groups. The first transfusions following their compatibility criteria were carried out at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in 1907. A few years later, at the University of Buenos Aires, the first indirect blood transfusion was successfully performed on a human being, and In 1916 an anticoagulant was begun to conserve blood samples for two or three weeks.
 |
| Karl Landsteiner |
With this system thousands of lives were saved during the First World War, and it is estimated that more than a billion since then until today. A system that would have been impossible without the contributions of Landsteiner. He received the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1930.
4. Norman Borlaug: The Green Revolution
American born and agricultural engineer training, Borlaug is considered by many the father of modern agriculture and the green revolution. Between 1964 and 1979 he directed the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement in Mexico, and his work there was a huge leap in seed selection and improvement technology. Their development gave rise to dwarf wheat varieties of high yield, which adapted easily and resisted common diseases in this crop.
 |
| Norman Borlaug |
Its expansion helped many communities in developing countries to access sufficient food to sustain and grow. Although today more than one billion people in the world go hungry, the percentage is the lowest in history. It is estimated that thanks to the developments of Borlaug have saved 260 million lives in the world. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
5. Edward Jenner and William Foege: end of smallpox
Edward Jenner was an English doctor sometimes considered the father of immunology for his work with the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. Although inoculation was common in its time, it was a process with many risks and little understanding. By then it was already a known fact that dairy herds were immune to smallpox, and Jenner postulated that this was because their contact during milking with the pus from the cow blisters (which contained the bovine pox virus, Similar to human smallpox) protected them from the virus. He tested his hypothesis by inoculating a number of patients and then exposing them to the virus, and the tests were successful in all cases.
 |
| Edward Jenner and William Foege |
But when, in 1979, smallpox was finally declared to be eradicated in the world, it was also largely due to the efforts of this American physician, who was considered responsible for the overall vaccination strategy. Prior to the development of this strategy, it was believed that it would be necessary to vaccinate between 80 and 100% of the world population to definitively eliminate the disease. A titanic task, if not directly impossible. With Foege's plan it was only necessary to immunize 7% to eradicate smallpox. His intervention and goal achieved have saved the lives of 131 million people.
6. John Enders: against measles and polio
In 1949, John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederik Robbins devised a method for multiplying the polio virus in non-nervous human cultures. This discovery, which earned them the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1954, was key to the fact that in 1952, another scientist, Jonas Salk, could produce this virus in large quantities, and then a vaccination campaign against polio.
 |
| John Enders |
Salk announced the success of his vaccination campaign and that made him a popular hero, but did so without giving credit to other researchers who had participated in the development, which earned him some isolation from the scientific community. Meanwhile, Enders and other collaborators succeeded in isolating the measles virus, and began to develop a vaccine against the disease. In 1960, Enders and his team began rehearsing 1,500 children in New York and 4,000 in Nigeria. Since then, it has been estimated that its developments have saved the lives of more than 120 million people worldwide.
7. Abel Wolman: water chlorination
The son of Polish immigrants in Baltimore, Wolman studied engineering and began working at the Meryland Public Health Department. It was there that he designed a method to standardize and automate the use of chlorine to disinfect drinking water, an effective way to eliminate the spread of infectious diseases through water such as dysentery or typhus. The idea was not new. The first patent for a water chlorination system dates back to 1888, but there was a problem: although chlorine was known to kill bacteria, the process was not fully understood and chlorine is poisonous if it is not handled well. This caused huge problems for those responsible for sewage systems.
 |
| Abel Wolman |
Working with another partner, Wolman found the formula for using chlorine in water supply in cities, including all relevant factors, from safety to the final taste of water. It was treated the first rigorous scientific standards so that the chlorination was carried out in a controlled and safe way. It is estimated that its developments have saved the lives of 173 million people worldwide.
8. Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Boris Chain: penicillin
When Fleming first noticed the antibiotic power of penicillin, it was by chance, which did not detract from its advancement but emphasized its enormous capacity for perception and intuition. However, not everything was casual: the Scottish scientist, impressed by the image of the battlefields of World War I, was trying to find a bactericidal substance. When he came back from a month of vacation in September 1928, he saw some contaminated crops, he discarded them without hesitation, but when he came back on them he later saw that bacteria did not grow around the contaminating fungi. It had just hit the fungus 'Penicillim notatum'.
 |
| Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Boris Chain |
Howard Florey and Boris Chain were interested in the finding of Flemming. Unlike the Scottish, who worked alone, these two researchers brought together a great team, promoted by scientific curiosity. It was they who succeeded in purifying and producing penicillin as a drug from the fungus, and thereby making it the first widely used antibiotic in medicine that has saved the lives of more than 80 million people. All three received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945.
9. David Nalin: oral rehydration therapy
This US physician has won the world's most prestigious awards in pediatric research thanks to the development of oral rehydration therapy (ORT), the treatment used in cases of dehydration. When Nalin was 26 years old and working in a laboratory in Bangladesh, he experienced first hand a Cholera epidemic. Until then, the only effective way to rehydrate patients was with intravenous fluids, something many patients in poor or isolated places could not access. Nalin thought that an oral treatment could replace intravenous in most cases of diarrhea. The formula contains not only water but also salts and sugars in very specific percentages. It is estimated that this development has saved some 60 million lives worldwide.
 |
| David Nalin |
10. Gaston Ramon: diphtheria vaccine
When the French veterinarian Ramon Gaston focused his efforts on combating diphtheria and tetanus, others before him had already identified the pathogen that caused them and had advanced in the investigation. But it was their findings that allowed both vaccines to be mass produced, thus demonstrating an effective way to combat these diseases worldwide.
 |
| Gaston Ramon |
Diphtheria is an infectious disease that can be fatal in many cases, especially in children. Gaston found that by dissolving the toxin that produces diphtheria in formalin, a compound from formaldehyde, he could obtain an antitoxin weak enough to avoid infection but sufficiently effective to unleash the immune response. Its formulation resulted in a very precise product that was used in many countries to combat large-scale diphtheria.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar