What a Milestone! Trivia Quiz

Answer:

In 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed an uncovered Petri dish had become contaminated with mould spores. Fleming observed that the bacteria near the mould colonies were dying. He was able to isolate the mould and identified it as a member of the Penicillium genus. He found it to be effective against all pathogens, including those that caused scarlet fever, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, meningitis and diphtheria. He theorised it was not the mould itself but some compound it had produced that had killed the bacteria. He named the 'mould juice' penicillin. The scientific community treated his work with little enthusiasm, especially as he found it difficult to isolate penicillin in large quantities. Two scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, continued Fleming's work to mass-produce it for use during World War II. Fleming received many awards including the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 1945.

HIV attacks and destroys the CD4 T lymphocytes of the immune system. CD4 cells play a major role in protecting the body from infection. HIV-infected patients who have compromised immune systems were not able to fight off simple infections that immune-competent people could. Hence HIV positive people developed acquired immunodeficiency syndrome which was a death sentence. Antiretroviral therapy (ART) is the combined use of medicines to treat HIV infection. People on ART take a combination of HIV medicines from at least two different HIV drug classes every day. As long as the medication is taken daily, ART is very effective at preventing HIV from multiplying in the host.

In 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best's successful pancreatic extraction of insulin was a miraculous, life-changing advance. It needed the pharmaceutical industry to produce insulin in large quantities but the discovery saved hundreds of millions of lives as people born with Type I Diabetes Mellitus almost certainly died prematurely. Dr. Banting was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 as was his laboratory supervisor Prof. John Macleod. The quantum of how much Professor Macleod contributed to the research has always been contentious. Dr Banting shared his prize money with Charles Best.

The Bangladesh Civil War in 1971 caused a huge exodus of refugees from East Pakistan into West Bengal, India. Ten million migrated into camps along the Indian-Pakistan border, which led to a cholera outbreak. The disease attacked a population already debilitated by exhaustion and starvation, leading to a heavy death toll. Thirty per cent of patients died of cholera within a few days. Health agencies were unable to provide enough IV saline solution to treat cholera. Dilip Mahalanabis, a paediatrician and clinical scientist working in the refugee camps, had worked with Oral Hydration Therapy (ORT) at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. ORT was a mixture of water, glucose, and salt, and caused glucose absorption in the small bowel, which in turn increased the absorption of sodium and water even in the presence of cholera enterotoxin. Literally, millions of lives were saved in the camp in 1971 and every cholera outbreak since.

In 1900, Karl Landsteiner, at the University of Vienna, discovered why some blood transfusions were successful and others caused death. Landsteiner mixed the red blood cells and serum of each of his staff and discovered the ABO blood group system. He demonstrated that the serum of some people agglutinated the red cells of other people. He identified three blood types, called A, B and C (C changed to O for "Zero", as he later discovered O blood contained no agglutinating antigens). The fourth, less frequent, blood group AB was discovered in 1902. In 1939 Landsteiner and colleagues discovered the Rh blood group system which caused the majority of transfusion reactions. Identification of the Rh factor was just as important as the discovery of ABO blood groups. In 1932 the first blood bank is believed to have been established in a Leningrad hospital. In 1937 Dr Bernard Fantus, at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States which meant a hospital laboratory could preserve and store donor blood, Fantus called this operation a "blood bank." Soon hospital and community blood banks were established.

Francis Crick (physics and X-ray crystallography) and James Watson (viral and bacterial genetics) knew that a detailed knowledge of the three-dimensional configuration of the gene was the central problem in molecular biology. Without this knowledge, heredity and reproduction could never be understood. Amazingly, working from others' works in disparate fields they were able to construct a 3D double helix model of DNA that matched the same pattern obtained by X-ray diffraction. Further, they were able to demonstrate the double-stranded molecule could both produce exact copies of itself and carry genetic instructions as the sequence of the bases in DNA forms a code by which genetic information can be stored and transmitted. This milestone gave rise to the field of molecular biology, which concerns how genes control the chemical processes within cells especially the synthesis of proteins.

The introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s had such widespread societal effects due to the control over fertility it enabled. This control allowed women to make decisions about other life choices, especially work. Perhaps no other medical 'device' has had the same impact. As well as the obvious changes to sexual practices among both adults and adolescents, the availability of the pill impacted social life, women's health, fertility trends, religion, family roles and interpersonal relationships, feminist issues, women's rights and gender relations. Perhaps the opposite of the pill, at least in terms of biological outcomes, is in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, which is a series of procedures to facilitate a pregnancy. It's an infertility treatment and is the most effective type of assisted reproductive technology. Louise Joy Brown is an English woman, born in 1978, who was the first human to have been born using in vitro fertilisation.

Mental health has never been well understood. Schizophrenia was first described in 1887 but, until the discovery of chlorpromazine in the early 50s, there were no medications available to treat this brain disorder. Chlorpromazine was a milestone in history, as it was the first drug available for a mental illness and its use for schizophrenia led to major improvements in the options for treating mental health disorders. The effectiveness of this drug allowed patients with schizophrenia to be cared for in their homes, instead of in special hospitals, reducing the stigma of being a patient in a mental institution. In 1953, around 560,000 patients lived in US mental health hospitals, but by 1988, the number had decreased to 97,000 according to Rosembloom (2002).

Corneal transplantation and kidney transplantation were successful as early as 1905 and 1953 respectively but it wasn't until Dr Christiaan Barnard, in 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town, led the world's first human-to-human heart transplant. This remains the most publicised event in world medical history. While the patient only survived 18 days post-surgery, the operation was considered a success and after some not very promising outcomes initially, the program became a huge success and heart transplantation became a normalised surgical procedure.

Jonas Salk's ability to produce a vaccine for Polio, the world's most feared disease in the 1950s was possible as poliovirus was successfully cultivated in human tissue by John Enders and colleagues at Boston Children's Hospital. Their pioneering work was recognized with the 1954 Nobel Prize. Jonas Salk, a US physician was then able to create a killed-virus polio vaccine that he tested on himself and his family. A year later it was tested on 1.6 million children in Canada, Finland and the USA. The results were tabled on 12 April 1955 and the vaccine was licensed the same day. By 1957, the US annual cases decreased from 58,000 to 5600, and by 1961, only 161 cases remained.