I haven't mentioned too -- mentioned too much about women
because there weren't many women who were doing science in the old day.
But let me mention a few superstars who lived from the 1800s on.
Florence Nightingale is the first.
She was a great mathematician and her parents really told her not to go into math
because they didn't think it was a ladylike thing to do.
And so, they told her she had to go into nursing.
But she was this mathematician and she used this skill in the Crimean War.
She showed that overcrowded hospitals -- she worked out the mathematics
for how crowding would lead to transmission of infection.
And she said you had a good ventilation and spread the beds apart.
In doing that, she reduced the intrahospital infection rate dramatically.
Marie Curie is -- has an amazing story.
She discovered radium.
She realized that radioactivity is an intrinsic atomic property of matter.
You may not know she pioneered a mobile x-ray unit
for the French Army in World War I and founded a radiologic school for nurses.
With her husband, she was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903
for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel,
who was awarded the other half of the Prize.
Then she won a second Nobel Prize in 1911
-- her husband had died -- for her work in radioactivity.
And her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, was also awarded a Nobel Prize
for work with her husband on the discovery of artificial radioactivity.
So, this is the first example of a parent/child Nobel laureates, whatever
that's worth.
And then, Rosalyn Yalow, who was a medical physicist,
collaborated with Solomon Berson and invented the radioimmunoassay.
And Berson died, so he didn't win the Nobel Prize, but Rosalyn Yalow did in 1977.
She was the first female and first nuclear physicist to win the Lasker Award, as well.
And Janet Rowley, who died just a few years ago, was an American geneticist in the 1970s.
She was the first scientist
to identify chromosomal translocation as the cause of leukemia and other cancers.
She discovered the Philadelphia chromosome.
And she won the National Medal of Science,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Lasker Award.
So, with that background,
now let me bring you some stories about the pharmaceutical industry.
And I would like to start that with mentioned Claude
Bernard, who was French, and lived from 1813 to 1878.
And among his accomplishments, he recognized the pancreas was important in digestion;
he described the glycogenic function of the liver;
he described the vasomotor system, the vasodilator and vasoconstrictor nerves;
and he discovered curare and its application in medicine.
Rudolph Virchow, who lived from 1821 to 1902, was Polish.
He defined leukemia and he wrote, "Omnis cellula e cellula" -- "Every cell originates
from another cell." So, he defined stem cells, probably the first person.
He also defined pulmonary emboli as related to thrombosis and embolism.
And one of my heroes, historically, is Pasteur, who lived from 1822 to 1895.
If you look carefully at this picture, you'll note that his right arm is sort of
just hanging loose.
And that was because, at a young age, he had a stroke and he couldn't use his right
arm. And, despite that, was able to make his phenomenal discoveries,
including the germ basis of fermentation, germ theory of infectious diseases.
He discovered staphylococci as the cause of boils.
He described streptococcus pyogenes
as a cause of puerperal sepsis, the disease Semmelweis studied.
He made the first vaccine for anthrax and, of course, the vaccine for rabies.
Koch, who lived in a similar
era, from 1843 to 1910, developed the Petri dish
and the use of blood agar pour plates to culture bacteria.
He was the first to describe anthrax infection before Pasteur made the vaccine.
He described and cultured tuberculosis, the first person to do that.
And he developed a TB skin test.
He described waterborne epidemics.
He made his Koch's postulates
and, in 1905, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on tuberculosis.
And if you look in his book
-- and I have a copy of his book -- these are all hand-drawings.
Here, he was -- drew the anthrax bacillus.
Behring, who lived in Germany from 1854 to 1917, discovered antibodies
-- first person to describe them -- for diphtheria.
And he was the first to use passive immunization to treat a person
who had been exposed.
And he won the Nobel Prize in 1901.
Paul Ehrlich,
who was Polish, described eosinophils as a medical student.
He described the complement pathway and the humoral immunity system.
But he also developed the first antibiotic, in this case, to treat syphilis.
And he worked with his technician, Sahachiro Hata, and they developed what Hoechst
called Salvarsan, which was an arsenobenzene, which had 32 percent and was toxic.
And, later, they developed a compound that was less toxic, called Compound 914.
And Ehrlich said, "We need magic bullets.
We must search for magic bullets.
We must strike the parasites, and the parasites only, if possible.
And to do this, we must learn to aim with chemical substances."
So, this was the first description of the need for antibiotics.
And, of course, Fleming, who in 1928, while working on influenza virus, observed
mold on a staph culture plate with a bacteria-free circle around it.
Now, most people probably would have just thrown it out,
but he asked why was there no bacteria around this mold,
and he discovered penicillin, and won the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Insulin is an interesting story and it gets to a little bit about scientific ethics.
In the summer of 1928, '21, material extracted from islets of Langerhans,
called insulin from the Latin for island, was given to diabetic dogs,
and the result was that abnormally high blood sugar levels were lowered.
Within six weeks,
Banting and Best -- Banting was a junior scientist
and Best was a technician -- they had purified insulin
and gave it to a 14-year-old boy who was dying of diabetes.
And they, basically, saved this kid's life.
Their boss -- or their paper was published in 1922, but their boss,
in 1923, shared -- and his name was Macleod -- shared the Nobel Prize with Banting.
And Macleod was away during the whole time that this study was done.
He was on vacation, his summer vacation.
But it was in his lab, so Macleod won the Nobel Prize with Banting.
And Best, who was the technician,
didn't get anything because technicians didn't win Nobel Prizes in those days.
The good news is that Macleod and Banting shared all their money
with the folks in the lab who did the work.
But the credit from the Nobel committee went to Banting and Macleod.
And it was very sad that Best didn't receive the Nobel Prize, which he clearly deserved.
Polio.
So, you've all heard of Salk and Sabin, but the Nobel Prize
went to Enders, Weller, and Robbins, who developed the technique
for culturing the polio virus, which eventually led to the vaccine.
And the Salk vaccine was the first and it used
an inactivated polio virus that was given to subjects.
And there was a serious bad incident with the development of this vaccine.
There was a lab manufacturing error by Cutter.
When they were inactivating the virus, they extrapolated rather than getting data
to the critical dose needed, minimal dose to inactivate the virus.
And they actually gave polio, I think, to the first thousand
or so people who received the vaccine.
But then, that was fixed and then the vaccine was developed.
But Sabin's vaccine is probably a better vaccine because it's a live virus vaccine.
And you get immunity if you -- one child in a classroom
gets this vaccine, the whole classroom will get it.
So, it's sort of a perfect vaccine.
And Sabin worked with Russian colleagues to prevent [sic] this vaccine
in the late 1950s and you know that it worked marvelously.