Unsung Heroes Podcast

08/05/2024

08/05/2024

08/05/2024

30/04/2024

Usung Heroes

1. Henrietta Lacks // Immortal Cells
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, but parts of her live on to this day. Since the time they were taken from her (without her knowledge) during a medical examination at Johns Hopkins, cells collected from her cervix tissue have remained alive—and thriving.

Lacks was one of many Black people whose bodies contributed to nonconsensual medical experiments at Johns Hopkins and beyond in the mid-20th century. Cells collected from others had died, but the ones lifted from Lacks’s tissue under the legitimizing sheen of medical treatment proved, shockingly, to divide again and again. The immortal "HeLa cells" have gone on to provide the foundation for two Nobel Prizes, nearly 20,000 patents, and countless medical advances. But it wasn’t until 20 years after Lacks’s death that anyone—including her family—knew they’d belonged to her.

2. Tenzing Norgay // A Climber Above
Before summiting Mount Everest was the pinnacle of every daredevil’s bucket list, a Nepali-Indian man by the name of Tenzing Norgay (born Namgyal Wangdi) became one of the first people to finish the daring trek.

For years, Norgay had served as a Sherpa, aiding in several unsuccessful attempts by British, Canadian, and Swiss mountaineering parties throughout the 1930s and ‘40s to reach Everest's elusive summit. Then, in 1953, he joined the expedition of John Hunt, a British Army officer, and ultimately accompanied fellow expedition member Edmund Hillary (whom Norgay had saved from a dangerous fall in a previous mission) to make the final ascent. Norgay went on to publish several books about his experiences.

3. Virginia Apgar // Better Health for Newborns
Despite graduating fourth in her class at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933, Virginia Apgar faced a host of setbacks in the early decades of her career. She initially worked in surgery, though was discouraged from continuing by the chair. Later, when she returned to Columbia as director of anesthesia in 1938, she had to contend with lower pay and her colleagues’ lack of respect for the then-undervalued field.

By the mid-1940s, however, things began to look up. Anesthesia became better respected, helping propel Apgar to the position of professor at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons—the first woman to have the job. The work Apgar is best remembered for came in the 1950s when she developed a system for assessing the health of newborns. The Apgar Score is still used to this day.

4. Enheduanna // Tales for the Ages
The daughter of Sumerian royalty, Enheduanna had a busy schedule. In addition to serving as high priestess in one of the area’s most important temples, she also found the time to cement herself as the earliest identified author in the world. Among her writings are 42 hymns and a personal devotion to a goddess (which also features a recounting of her own exile from the ancient city of Ur).

Enheduanna lived in around 2300 BCE, but her return to relevance didn’t come until the 1950s, when the first academic papers drew on 1927 archaeological discoveries during the excavation of Ur to examine her work and legacy.

5. Maurice Hilleman // Vaccine Maven
Ever wondered why you haven’t come down with measles, mumps, or rubella recently? You can thank Maurice Hillerman, a Depression-era farm boy turned virologist who earned a microbiology and chemistry Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1944. For the next 60 years, Hillerman was tenacious in his battle against viruses and his quick work likely helped avert a pandemic in 1957.

In spite (or maybe because) of his brilliance, he wasn’t always one for convention. When his daughter came down with the mumps in 1963, he swabbed her throat and had a vaccine developed just four years later. By the end of his career, he’d developed more than 40 vaccines.

6. Rosalind Franklin // The Third Contributor to the Double Helix
When most people think of DNA, they think of two pairs—the double-helix and Watson and Crick. James Watson and James Crick revolutionized the scientific world when they published their model of DNA. And while the two were duly lauded, few knew that there had been a third (and unwitting) contributor: Rosalind Franklin.

Franklin, as it happened, had also been working to uncover the structure of DNA, and had a now-famous photograph among her research. When an estranged work partner showed Franklin’s unpublished research to Watson and Crick, they ultimately built their final model in part off of her findings. For years afterward, Franklin’s critical contributions were all but erased.

7. Ignaz Semmelweis // Hygiene Pioneer
Wash my hands? Before performing surgery? Hard pass. That was the (paraphrased) reaction to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’s 1846 suggestion that maybe, just maybe, his medical colleagues should disinfect their hands and tools between handling cadavers and helping to deliver newborns.

When he implemented this simple requirement in his Vienna hospital department, death rates among new moms plummeted. Germ theory hadn’t yet been established, which meant Semmelweis couldn’t explain why his practice worked, only that it clearly did. Despite the dramatic results, doctors didn’t take kindly to the implication that they were to blame for patients’ deaths, and Semmelweis’s pugnacious attitude didn’t win him many allies. Eventually, he lost his job, and his former staff abandoned the practice.

7. Ignaz Semmelweis // Hygiene Pioneer
Wash my hands? Before performing surgery? Hard pass. That was the (paraphrased) reaction to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’s 1846 suggestion that maybe, just maybe, his medical colleagues should disinfect their hands and tools between handling cadavers and helping to deliver newborns.

When he implemented this simple requirement in his Vienna hospital department, death rates among new moms plummeted. Germ theory hadn’t yet been established, which meant Semmelweis couldn’t explain why his practice worked, only that it clearly did. Despite the dramatic results, doctors didn’t take kindly to the implication that they were to blame for patients’ deaths, and Semmelweis’s pugnacious attitude didn’t win him many allies. Eventually, he lost his job, and his former staff abandoned the practice.

7. Ignaz Semmelweis // Hygiene Pioneer
Wash my hands? Before performing surgery? Hard pass. That was the (paraphrased) reaction to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’s 1846 suggestion that maybe, just maybe, his medical colleagues should disinfect their hands and tools between handling cadavers and helping to deliver newborns.

When he implemented this simple requirement in his Vienna hospital department, death rates among new moms plummeted. Germ theory hadn’t yet been established, which meant Semmelweis couldn’t explain why his practice worked, only that it clearly did. Despite the dramatic results, doctors didn’t take kindly to the implication that they were to blame for patients’ deaths, and Semmelweis’s pugnacious attitude didn’t win him many allies. Eventually, he lost his job, and his former staff abandoned the practice.

7. Ignaz Semmelweis // Hygiene Pioneer
Wash my hands? Before performing surgery? Hard pass. That was the (paraphrased) reaction to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’s 1846 suggestion that maybe, just maybe, his medical colleagues should disinfect their hands and tools between handling cadavers and helping to deliver newborns.

When he implemented this simple requirement in his Vienna hospital department, death rates among new moms plummeted. Germ theory hadn’t yet been established, which meant Semmelweis couldn’t explain why his practice worked, only that it clearly did. Despite the dramatic results, doctors didn’t take kindly to the implication that they were to blame for patients’ deaths, and Semmelweis’s pugnacious attitude didn’t win him many allies. Eventually, he lost his job, and his former staff abandoned the practice.