100 Greatest Discoveries (2004) s01e07 Episode Script
Medicine
A bold exploration of human anatomy Challenging centuries' of accepted beliefs.
A mysterious glow that point a way to a startling new vision of the world A miracle drug that saved the lives of countless allies' soldiers The killer behind the epidemic unmask These are among the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine Each one a revolutionary breakthrough that saves lives by pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
By imagining the unimaginable In ancient Greece the treatment of disease was based more on philosophy than in genuine understanding of human anatomy Surgical procedures were rare and human dissection was not an accepted practice As a result, physicians had little firsthand information of the inside of the human body.
It wasn't until the renaissance that the science of the human anatomy was born A Belgian physician Andrea Vesalius shocked many by deciding to investigate an anatomy by dissecting human bodies.
Bodies that he was often forced to procured under cover of night For medical student like Vesalius who wanted to dissect, they had to just find bodies from outside of the legal channels Once Vesalius became a professor at Padua, the person in charge of execution was actually a friend of his So he said he could even and observed the living prisoners who awaiting execution :, and said I want that one, I want that one.
And then the person would be executed According to doctor Bylebal, the Vesalius was determined to pass on the firsthand knowledge that he gained from skillful firsthand dissections By writing a book on human anatomy, «» the result was his "De humani corporis fabrica" and "the structure of the human body" First published in 1538, fabrica is considered one of the greatest books in medical literature It's regarded as one of the greatest discoveries in medicine because it contains the first accurate description of interior of the human body This was the first major challenge to the authority of the ancient Greek physicians ,, The book had great sail that must have to been a wealthy, literary public that went far beyond the medical profession.
And the pictures are very elaborated, kicked with the written text, just made the knowledge of human anatomy much more accessible Thanks to Vesalius, the study of human anatomy through dissection became a central component of medical training And helped to lead our next great discovery The human heart, a muscle designed of a fist Beating more than a hundred thousand times a day, 70,20 over two billions heart beats by the time you turn 70 Pumping more than 5 gallons of blood a minute Blood flow through the body, traveling a complex high way of arteries and veins , It's estimated that if all the blood vessels in just one human body were placed in a line They reach some six thousand miles, more than twice around the earth.
17, But in the early part of seventeen century, how blood works in the body was misunderstood , The prevailing theory was that , up and flows through the heart by way of pours in the soft tissue Among those who believed in this theory was an English physician named William Harvey.
He was fascinated with the workings of the heart The more he study the beat heart of animals on his dissecting table, the more he realized the accepted theory of blood flow couldn't be right Quiet explicitly, he says: I began to think what the blood might have emotion has it were in a cycle.
And then he began a new paragraph, he says: this an afterward I found to be true , In his dissections, Harvey observed that heart had one-way valve that kept the blood flowing in one direction.
, Some valve led the blood in, while others let it out.
Here was his great discovery The heart he realized was pumping blood into the arteries were then circulated through the veins coming for circle back into the heart Ready to start the cycle all over again.
, Today, it's obvious that the blood circulates in the human body 17, But in the seventeen century, William Harvey's discovery was revolutionary This was really striking at the very core of the traditional medical ideas And at the end of his treaties, Harvey says when I think of the complicit implication that this will have for medicine I see a feel of almost unlimited possibilities , Harvey's discovery led to major advances in anatomical research in surgery, and simple life saving ones too In operating rooms in Trauma center around the world, , surgical clams are used to stem the flow of the blood in keep a patient's circulation in attached A simple device, but each one reminds the William Harvey's great discovery Another great discovery having to do blood occurred in Vienna in 1900 There was a great enthusiasm throughout Europe for transfusing blood.
And at first they were acclaimed that this had marvelous therapeutic effect, , but this was followed with amounts of spare reports people who died.
, Why did some blood transfusion work and others didn't K.
An Austrian physician named Karl Lansteiner was determined to find the answer.
, He makes blood samples from various individuals and study the effects In some cases, the sample mixed safely But in other combinations, the blood clumped and became stinky , On closer examination, Lansteiner found that clumping occurred when some proteins called antibodies in the recipient blood Blended to other proteins called antigens on the donors' red blood cells.
For Lansteiner, this was the moment of discovery He realized that not all human blood was the same, he determined that human blood could be divided into four distinct groups A,B,ABO He called this blood groups A, B, AB, and O He realized that blood transfusion could only be carried outside safely when people received blood from someone who shared the same blood group The impact of Lansteiner's discovery was immediate, ,, Within a few years, blood transfusions have been practiced around the world, saving countless lives 1950's, But the nineteen fifties, accurate blood typing helped make organ transplant possible ,3 Today, in United States alone, blood transfusions are performed about once every three seconds ,450 Without them, it's estimated that four and a half million Americans would die each year, While the first great discovery about human anatomy enabled physicians to save more lives There was little they could do to reduce pain Without anesthesia, surgery was a waking nightmare Patients were held down or leashed on a table Surgeon worked as quickly as possible, the sooner the torment was over, the better 1811, In 1811, one woman wrote off the ordeal ,, When the dreadful steels was clutch in, cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves I needn't no injunction not to restrain my cries I began to scream that last during the whole time, so scrucianating was the agony.
Surgery was a last resort , Many people simply chose to die rather than to have the surgeon cut into them with its knife ,, According to doctor Harden, for centuries, various remedies were used to help ease pain during surgery Some like opium or extract form the mandrake's root were narcotics 1840's, By the eighteen forties, several individual run the trail of finding more effective anesthetics In Boston, two dentists Wales and William Morton both from who knew each other.
And in Georgia, a small town doctor named Crawford Long The experiment with two chemicals thought for potential for reducing the pain nitrous oxide or laughing gas and aether, a liquid mix of alcohol and sulphuric acid just who discovered anesthesia is still a matter of debate, all three doctors claimed it 18461016, one of the first publication demonstration of anesthesia occurred on October sixteenth 1846 William Morton had been experimenting with aether for month , Trying to find the dozes that would enable the patients undergo surgery pain free With the special device that was his own creation, he convened a demonstration before audience of Boston surgeon and medical students He administered aether to a patient to is about to have a tumor moved from his neck Morton waited The surgeon made the first decision Remarkably, the patient didn't cry out , After the surgery, the patient reported feeling nothing throughout the entire operation And the word quickly spread Surgical pain was conquered, anesthesia has been discovered , Despite the discovery, many people were reluctant to use anesthesia Some religions believed that pain was to be tolerated not relieved Especially during childbirth Queen Victoria played a role in this.
In 1853, 1853, she was giving birth to prince Leopold and she asked for an was giving for chloroform And found that it relieved the pain of childbirth And short after, women in general , Said, I think I will have chloroform too.
It's good enough for the queen.
It's good enough for me X , It's also impossible to imagine life without our next great discovery , Imagine surgery without first been able to see where to made the scissor Which bone maybe broken Where the bullet may be What pathological condition may exist , The ability to see inside the human body without cutting it open Was a turning point in the history of medicine , To find out more about it, I paved a visit to Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles a professor of history at Yale University 19,, At the end of nineteen century, people were using electricity even they didn't understand what it was , This is tube, which I believe is a copy of the one made by the Siemens Company Which was the one that put been used by Roentgen 1895, Roentgen was a German physicist William Roentgen.
in 1895, he was in an experiment with a cathode ray tube , And a vacuum glass cylinder, a vacuum tube Roentgen marveled that glow created by the rays coming from the tube ,, For one of his experiments, roentgen enclosed the tube in a black cardboard and darkened the room Then he turned on the tube Moments later, something startled him A photographic plate in his lab was glowing So he realized that something was unusual with what's going on He knew that whatever the ray that was coming out was not the cathode ray He also discovered that it didn't respond to magnetism.
It couldn't deflect the way you could cathode rays It was something altogether new "X", and he called it X for unknown Oh, like algebra, absolutely ,X Roentgen had accidentally discovered the radiation unknown to science which he called X-rays , After having been rather mysterious for several weeks, he called his wife down :, He said: Bertha let me show you what I am doing because no one is going to believe that , And he handle put her hand under the ray and he took an image of her hand Well the image was a lot like this picture And she was reputed to said: I have seen my own death Because known as days you only saw a skeleton after someone who died , The idea that seen part of the body on an image of a living person just , Beyond anybody's imagination.
Yes It was as if a secret door had been opened, revealing a hidden universe Roentgen had discovered a powerful new technology, one that let to our revolution in medical diagnostics X In the history of science, the discovery of X-rays is the only discovery that was made when no one was looking for.
It was totally by chance ,,, But as important, once has been discovered, it was accepted by everyone in the world.
It was no controversy Within a week or two our world have changed ,, Today, the legacy of roentgen's discovery can be found in the powerful technology that followed its wake From the CT SCAN that helps diagnose what else it is NASAX To NASA'S Chandra's x-ray telescope X which astronomers are using to detect x-rays from the further of the space.
All form a discovery that happened by accident ,X Some discoveries like X-rays seemed to come out of blue While others like our next great discovery developed over time with one scientist contributing the work on another 1846, Vienna 1846, a city of beauty and culture But Vienna general hospital, there was the specter of death Many of the women who came here to give the birth were dying, , the cause, childbed fever, an infection of uterus When doctor Ignaz Semmelweis came to work at the hospital, he was alarmed the scope of the problem And intrigued by a curious discrepancy 2, They had two wards, and one the mothers were delivered by physicians , And the others, the mothers have the baby delivered by midwifes Semmelweis noticed that the word with the physicians to deliver the babies 7% 7 percent of the mothers died from what was called childbed fever ,2% And the word with midwives delivered only two percent of the mothers who died from childbed fever , And he was bothered because physicians had more training.
They are supposed to do better about their patients Semmelweis was determined to find out what was going on He noticed that one of the main things that physicians did that midwives did not to Was to conducted autopsy on these mothers after they died Did they go back and deliver babies and examined mothers without washing their hands Just like Motor Mechanic who had finished up one car and ,, moved to the next car without washing his hands' grease soil.
He didn't see any reason to have to did this Semmelweis wondered if the doctor was carrying some invisible matter on their hands , Which they passed on to their maternity patients, causing them to die , To find out, he conducted a test He decided that he would have this student physicians under his control wash their hands in a chlorine solution 1%, And suddenly, the percentage of maternal death dropped to one percent, that's lower than the midwives' With this demonstration, Semmelweis realized that infectious disease in this case the childbed fever has a single cause, , If you limited the source of infection, the disease is not occurred 1846, But in 1846, no one had made the connection between bacteria and infections As a result, Semmelweis's idea was ignored 10, It would take ten more years before another scientist would turn his attention to germs His name, Louis Pasteur Pasteur had lost his three of five children to typhoid fever Which perhaps explained why he was determined to find the cause of infectious diseases It was Pasteur's work on behalf of the beer and wine industry that put them on the right track Pasteur was trying to find out what was spoiling so much of the counties' wine production , He discovered that the spoiled wine was contaminated by microorganism, germs And the germs were causing the wine to sour , But would a simple heat treatment, he showed that the germ could be killed off and the wine save Pasteurization was born So when he came to finding the cause of infectious and contagious disease Pasteur knew where to look Germs he said caused specific diseases and he proved it through a series of experiments and demonstrations That led to his great discovery, germ theory The germ theory literally marks the beginning of the modern medicine The germ theory has one central idea that one microorganism causes one disease in everybody Our next great discovery happened in the nineteenth century When smallpox killed estimated forty million people around the world , Doctors were unable to find the cause or discovered a cure But in a small English village Talked of somehow local to immune the smallpox got the attention of a country doctor Edward Jenner It was said that the villagers who worked in the diary business were save from smallpox because they have been already been infected by cowpox A related but less severe disease that inflated cattle , Cowpox victim suffered fever and sores on their hands But little else Jenner studied the phenomena and began to wonder if the pus in the cowpox was somehow responsible for protecting against smallpox 1796514, On may fourteen 1796, during an outbreak of smallpox He decided to test his theory Jenner withdrew pus cowpox from sores on the hands of dairymaid Then he visited another family in the village He inoculated the healthy eight-year old boy with the cowpox virus Confident in the outcome ,, In the days that followed, the boy developed a slight fever and some cowpox blisters Then recovered 6, Six weeks later, Jenner returned This time, he inoculated the boy with smallpox.
Then waited The moment of success or failure was at hand , Within days, Jenner had his answer , The boy was completely healthy, resistant to smallpox Vaccination for smallpox was revolutionary , because it represent people's attempt to intervene the disease process to prevent it upfront This is the first time a man product had been used actively to prevent disease before it occurred 30, Fifty years after Jenner's discovery, Louis Pasteur pushed the concept of vaccination even further Developing vaccine against rabies and humans and anthrax in sheep 20, At the twenty century, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin independently developed vaccine against polio And we all own to Jenner's great discovery Our next great discovery depended on the contribution of researchers working independently on the same problem over many years Throughout history, scurvy was a painful disease that inflicted sailors with hemorrhage and skin lesions 1747, Finally in 1747, a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind found the remedy He discovered that the scurvy could be prevented by including citrus fruits in the sailor's diet Another disease afflicted sailors was beriberi, , a degenerated disease that attacks the nerve heart and digestive system 19, Until the nineteen century, a Dutch physician named Christiaan Ekman traced its cause in diet Including polished white rice rather than unpolished brown rice Well both these discoveries indicated a link between disease and dietary deficiency , It wasn't until the work of British biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins that the connection became clear Hopkins suspected that our bodies' need certain nutrients that can only be acquired by eating certain food To prove his point, he conducted a series of experiments ,, He fed mice in synthetic diet consisting entirely pure protein, fats, carbohydrate and salts The mice became sick and stop growing , But given a small amount of milk, the mice recovered Hopkins has discovered what he called accessory food factor which later came to be known as vitamins ,B1 Beriberi turned out caused by deficiency of thiamin, vitamin B1 , Which was lost in polished rice but plentiful in natural grain ,C And citrus prevent scurvy because it contain a ascorbic acid, vitamin C Hopkins's discovery was a major shift in our understanding of the importance of nutrition Vitamins are responsible for so many of our bodies' normal functions Everything from fighting infection to regulating metabolism It's hard to imagine life without them just like our next great discovery 1000, World War 1, more than ten million died, many from infection of their wounds After the war, researchers intensified to find the save method of repelling the bacteria invaders Among those on the case was Scottish physician Alexander Fleming While studying staphylococci bacteria, Fleming noticed something unusual growing in the culture dish , A mould, penicillin motatium He thought that the bacteria surrounding the mould had died off Which let him to speculate the mould was producing a substance that was lethal to the bacteria He named the substance penicillin For the next several years, Fleming tried extracting to penicillin applying to treat infections , But he was unsuccessful, and eventually gave up Fleming's work however proved invaluable 1935, In 1935, scientist Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at oxford university , Came across a record of Fleming's curious but incomplete work with penicillin and decided to investigated This time, they successfully extracted the purified penicillin And in 1940 they tested it The injected 8 mice with lethal doses of the bacteria streptococcus Then they injected four of the mice with penicillin Within hours they beheld the results The four mice not treated with the penicillin were died But the three of four that had been given penicillin were alive Form Fleming and Florey and chain, the world's first antibiotic was born It was a miracle drug.
It cured so many diseases that had caused so much pain and suffering ,,, Stretch through rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, syphilis and gonorrhea It would things that we could think about today will kill you Our next great discovery came to rescue in the World War 2 It provided soldier with the drugs to fight dysentery while they fought themselves in south pacific Eventually, it also led to a revolutionary chemotherapeutic treatment of bacterial infection The scientist to made it all happened was pathologist Dumak 1932, In 1932, Dumak was studying the potential medical application of some new chemical dyes Working with the newly synthesize chemical dye called prontosil, Dumak injected it into some lab mice that were infected with streptococcus bacteria The dye attached the bacteria just as Dumak had hoped But the bacteria survived The dye he seemed wasn't toxic enough Then something startling happened , While the dyed didn't kill the bacteria, it did inhibit their growth , The spread of the infection were stopped.
The mice recovered It's not clear when Dumak first used prontosil on a human patient But the new drug achieved fame when it saved the life of a boy seriously infected with streptococcus -, The patient's name, Franklin D Roosevelt junior, son of the president of the United States , From that moment on dumark's discovery was a sensation Because prontosil contain what was known as sulfonamide molecular structure , It was called a sulfur drug, the first of its kind A synthetical chemical substance that could cure and prevent bacterial infection Dumak had opened the door to a revolutionary new approach in a treatment of disease The use of chemotherapeutic drugs, a discovery that would go on to save tens of thousands of lives Our next great discovery helped save the lives of millions worldwide who were afflicted with diabetes Diabetes is a disease that disrupt the body's mechanism for processing sugar .
, Which can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart disease even death ,, For centuries, physicians studied diabetes searching in vain for cure Finally in late eighteen hundreds, a breakthrough occurred It was discovered that the bodies of diabetes had something in common A group of cells in pancreas was always damaged These cells produced hormones that control blood sugar, that hormone is called insulin Then in 1920, another breakthrough Canadian surgeon Frederick Banting and a graduate student named Charles Best Were studying how insulin was produced in the pancreas of dogs On a hunch, Banting took an extract from the insulin producing cells of healthy dog And injected the extract into other dogs already afflicted with diabetes The results were astounding , Within a few hours the blood sugar levels of the diabetic dogs decreased significantly Now, Banting and his team set their sights on finding animals whose insulin were closely resembles to human's insulin They found a close match of insulin taken from cow , Purified for save treatment, then in January 1922, conducted the first clinical trial Banting administed the insulin to a fourteen year-old boy dying of diabetes And the boy made a dramatic recovery How important was Banting's discovery Why not ask be estimated thirteen million Americans who rely on insulin to control their diabetes everyday Cancer The second leading cause of death in the United States Intensify research of its origin development has spond remarkable scientific breakthroughs Perhaps no more significant than our next great discovery , 2 To find out about the discovery, I caught up with two Nobel Prize winning cancer researchers (1989) Michael Bishop and Harold Eliot Varmus at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City Varmus and bishop first joined forces to research cancer in the nineteen seventies At the time, there were several prevailing theories about the cause of the disease Malignant cells are complicated.
It's not just the self can replicate, definitely it can invade, , Enlist new blood vessel that has very complex capability One theory concerned the Rous 'sarcoma virus, a virus that cause cancer in chickens When the virus attacked the cells of the chicken DNA It inserted its genetic material into the hosted DNA ,DNA According to the theory the viral DNA later became a cancer causing agent A second theory suggested that once the Rous 'sarcoma virus inserted its genetic material into the hosted cell , The cancer causing genes didn't activate themselves but remained dormant until trigger by outside influences ,, Such as harmful chemicals radiation or even viral infections , This cancer causing genes called oncogene became the focus of Varmus and bishop's research The fundamental question was Does a human cell, dose the human genome contain genes that are or capable of becoming ocogene the sort of the virus Tumor causing genes.
Tumor causing genes.
--, Cancer causing genes.
Right.
Are they in there or not So what did you discoverer , First we started with the chicken because that's where this virus came from Is there gene in chickens Later is the gene in other birds in mammals in humans Related to the cancer gene of Rous 'sarcoma The way we did is to make a radioactive molecule that could be used as a probe For asking whether the Rous 'sarcoma virus genes are come of virus resembled a normal gene present in the chromosomes of a chicken And the answer was yes It was a landmark discovery DNA Varmus and bishop found that the cancer causing genes were always present in the DNA of normal uninfected chicken cells , DNA Even more remarkable, they found in human DNA as well Proof that the seeds of cancer may already be in each of us as the cellular level just waiting to be activated How can one of our own genes which we have our all lives cause cancer When cell divide, mistakes are made They are more frequent if the cells are stressed by , A cosmic rays, cigarette smoke , Cigarette smoke, it's a good example 30DNA it's important also to recognize cell divide they had to copy three billion base pair of DNA And anybody ever try to types on, they know it's not easy to do that we have spell check mechanism that would allow detect the mistakes, repair the mistakes , But still things look through when you things onto a large scale So why is this a great discovery That the difference between the gene in the virus and gene in the cell Exemplifies the fundamental way people were trying to think about cancer And we now do think about cancer that small changes in particular genes in our cells can convert cells from control regular growth to another behavior to the behavior of malignant cell And this was really the first direct illustration of that sort of thing Is modern cancer research a result of your discovery At a fundamental platform which almost all molecular approach of cancers built , And indeed some of runs the cancer in hospital Were excited to meet the moment to see how understanding of cancer the molecular and genetic level Is influencing the way in which we treat a lot of our patients , Why is it important Looking for this kind of gene is vital in diagnostics now It's vital in prediction of how cancers are going to behave ,, And above all it is vital because it's provide its targets for truly specific therapy, that we simply didn't have before The city of Chicago, population of three million, the same number of people who are dying each year from AIDS One of the worst epidemics in modern history The first clues about the disease emerged in the early nineteen eighties , Researchers in the United States reported that a rising number of patients were dying form weird infections and cancers Blood samples revealed that the patients had extremely low level of CD for T lymphocyte , White blood cell vital to the immune system 1982, In 1982, the center for disease control and prevention gave the disease a name AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Two researchers took up the case Luc Montagnier At the institute of pasture in Paris And Robert Gallo cancer institute outside Washington DC Both shared the credit for breakthrough discovery ,HIV that eventually uncover the cause of AIDS, HIV human immunodeficiency virus What is the difference about human immunodeficiency virus from another virus like the flu or something , 7 First, the virus doesn't give evidence of disease for years; let's take an average, seven years Second, probably that was rather unique, by the time a person presented themselves with AIDS You know, I am sick, I am goanna to the hospital They had a myriad of other infections What was the cause Hard to demonstrate which one of these is the cause of the disease , In most cases of virus exist for one purpose , To infect the whole cell and reproduce , Typically it attached itself to the host and released its genetic information into the cell This enables the virus to take over the cell's normal functions, redirecting them to produce new virus particles , These particles and then released to attack more cells HIV HIV is not a conventional virus, it belonged to the family virus that category virus as that scientists call retroviruses How are retroviruses different It just like the virus class that includes Polio or virus class include influence retroviruses are another type of viruses What unique about retroviruses is that we might say the definition of retrovirus RNADNA Is each genetic information in the form of RNA is converted into DNA DNA But is what happens to DNA that gives us the problem Then what is it DNA The DNA gets incorporate into our genes, DNA the DNA of the virus becomes a part of us -T DNA As the we produce, they are reproducing with virus the retrovirus's DNA in them.
- Exactly Forever, you never get over it You get code harboring the genetic information of the virus, ,,, sometimes making you virus others silence, quit, perhaps hidden , But only later to pump out and reproduce virus again.
, I mean very rapidly upon infection or establishing, the infection is likely to be life long That's what, that's the crocks of the issue for me.
HIV A cure for HIV remained elusive HIV But to discovery HIV is retrovirus and that HIV caused AIDS has led to breakthrough Fight against the disease and beyond What's the change in medicine since the discovery of retroviruses or more specifically discovery of this viruses AIDS has been the lead ship and showing that anti-drug therapy is possible , In general it was thought, because the viruses insert the cell, our cells for how they reproduce themselves It would be nearly impossible to target them effectively without poisoning a person badly You are saying that nobody would investing if I mean anti-virus , AIDS has opened the door the anti-virus research in the pharmaceutical companies and the universities broadly across the world , AIDS has also been puzzled us sociologically I witnessed firsthand a difference between developing and developed nations , You can't just drop the drugs in the beach and run home and requires the training how the use the drugs and have that relationship with several Africa countries now --,.
so this is irony, this horrible disease is actually bringing people together, - I think so.
Thanks to the discoveries we just seen, the world has changed , From germ theory to uncovering the origins of cancer.
These breakthroughs have altered the course of history Saving countless lives And pushing the boundaries of our medical knowledge to where we are today Ready for the next breakthrough, the next great discovery
A mysterious glow that point a way to a startling new vision of the world A miracle drug that saved the lives of countless allies' soldiers The killer behind the epidemic unmask These are among the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine Each one a revolutionary breakthrough that saves lives by pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
By imagining the unimaginable In ancient Greece the treatment of disease was based more on philosophy than in genuine understanding of human anatomy Surgical procedures were rare and human dissection was not an accepted practice As a result, physicians had little firsthand information of the inside of the human body.
It wasn't until the renaissance that the science of the human anatomy was born A Belgian physician Andrea Vesalius shocked many by deciding to investigate an anatomy by dissecting human bodies.
Bodies that he was often forced to procured under cover of night For medical student like Vesalius who wanted to dissect, they had to just find bodies from outside of the legal channels Once Vesalius became a professor at Padua, the person in charge of execution was actually a friend of his So he said he could even and observed the living prisoners who awaiting execution :, and said I want that one, I want that one.
And then the person would be executed According to doctor Bylebal, the Vesalius was determined to pass on the firsthand knowledge that he gained from skillful firsthand dissections By writing a book on human anatomy, «» the result was his "De humani corporis fabrica" and "the structure of the human body" First published in 1538, fabrica is considered one of the greatest books in medical literature It's regarded as one of the greatest discoveries in medicine because it contains the first accurate description of interior of the human body This was the first major challenge to the authority of the ancient Greek physicians ,, The book had great sail that must have to been a wealthy, literary public that went far beyond the medical profession.
And the pictures are very elaborated, kicked with the written text, just made the knowledge of human anatomy much more accessible Thanks to Vesalius, the study of human anatomy through dissection became a central component of medical training And helped to lead our next great discovery The human heart, a muscle designed of a fist Beating more than a hundred thousand times a day, 70,20 over two billions heart beats by the time you turn 70 Pumping more than 5 gallons of blood a minute Blood flow through the body, traveling a complex high way of arteries and veins , It's estimated that if all the blood vessels in just one human body were placed in a line They reach some six thousand miles, more than twice around the earth.
17, But in the early part of seventeen century, how blood works in the body was misunderstood , The prevailing theory was that , up and flows through the heart by way of pours in the soft tissue Among those who believed in this theory was an English physician named William Harvey.
He was fascinated with the workings of the heart The more he study the beat heart of animals on his dissecting table, the more he realized the accepted theory of blood flow couldn't be right Quiet explicitly, he says: I began to think what the blood might have emotion has it were in a cycle.
And then he began a new paragraph, he says: this an afterward I found to be true , In his dissections, Harvey observed that heart had one-way valve that kept the blood flowing in one direction.
, Some valve led the blood in, while others let it out.
Here was his great discovery The heart he realized was pumping blood into the arteries were then circulated through the veins coming for circle back into the heart Ready to start the cycle all over again.
, Today, it's obvious that the blood circulates in the human body 17, But in the seventeen century, William Harvey's discovery was revolutionary This was really striking at the very core of the traditional medical ideas And at the end of his treaties, Harvey says when I think of the complicit implication that this will have for medicine I see a feel of almost unlimited possibilities , Harvey's discovery led to major advances in anatomical research in surgery, and simple life saving ones too In operating rooms in Trauma center around the world, , surgical clams are used to stem the flow of the blood in keep a patient's circulation in attached A simple device, but each one reminds the William Harvey's great discovery Another great discovery having to do blood occurred in Vienna in 1900 There was a great enthusiasm throughout Europe for transfusing blood.
And at first they were acclaimed that this had marvelous therapeutic effect, , but this was followed with amounts of spare reports people who died.
, Why did some blood transfusion work and others didn't K.
An Austrian physician named Karl Lansteiner was determined to find the answer.
, He makes blood samples from various individuals and study the effects In some cases, the sample mixed safely But in other combinations, the blood clumped and became stinky , On closer examination, Lansteiner found that clumping occurred when some proteins called antibodies in the recipient blood Blended to other proteins called antigens on the donors' red blood cells.
For Lansteiner, this was the moment of discovery He realized that not all human blood was the same, he determined that human blood could be divided into four distinct groups A,B,ABO He called this blood groups A, B, AB, and O He realized that blood transfusion could only be carried outside safely when people received blood from someone who shared the same blood group The impact of Lansteiner's discovery was immediate, ,, Within a few years, blood transfusions have been practiced around the world, saving countless lives 1950's, But the nineteen fifties, accurate blood typing helped make organ transplant possible ,3 Today, in United States alone, blood transfusions are performed about once every three seconds ,450 Without them, it's estimated that four and a half million Americans would die each year, While the first great discovery about human anatomy enabled physicians to save more lives There was little they could do to reduce pain Without anesthesia, surgery was a waking nightmare Patients were held down or leashed on a table Surgeon worked as quickly as possible, the sooner the torment was over, the better 1811, In 1811, one woman wrote off the ordeal ,, When the dreadful steels was clutch in, cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves I needn't no injunction not to restrain my cries I began to scream that last during the whole time, so scrucianating was the agony.
Surgery was a last resort , Many people simply chose to die rather than to have the surgeon cut into them with its knife ,, According to doctor Harden, for centuries, various remedies were used to help ease pain during surgery Some like opium or extract form the mandrake's root were narcotics 1840's, By the eighteen forties, several individual run the trail of finding more effective anesthetics In Boston, two dentists Wales and William Morton both from who knew each other.
And in Georgia, a small town doctor named Crawford Long The experiment with two chemicals thought for potential for reducing the pain nitrous oxide or laughing gas and aether, a liquid mix of alcohol and sulphuric acid just who discovered anesthesia is still a matter of debate, all three doctors claimed it 18461016, one of the first publication demonstration of anesthesia occurred on October sixteenth 1846 William Morton had been experimenting with aether for month , Trying to find the dozes that would enable the patients undergo surgery pain free With the special device that was his own creation, he convened a demonstration before audience of Boston surgeon and medical students He administered aether to a patient to is about to have a tumor moved from his neck Morton waited The surgeon made the first decision Remarkably, the patient didn't cry out , After the surgery, the patient reported feeling nothing throughout the entire operation And the word quickly spread Surgical pain was conquered, anesthesia has been discovered , Despite the discovery, many people were reluctant to use anesthesia Some religions believed that pain was to be tolerated not relieved Especially during childbirth Queen Victoria played a role in this.
In 1853, 1853, she was giving birth to prince Leopold and she asked for an was giving for chloroform And found that it relieved the pain of childbirth And short after, women in general , Said, I think I will have chloroform too.
It's good enough for the queen.
It's good enough for me X , It's also impossible to imagine life without our next great discovery , Imagine surgery without first been able to see where to made the scissor Which bone maybe broken Where the bullet may be What pathological condition may exist , The ability to see inside the human body without cutting it open Was a turning point in the history of medicine , To find out more about it, I paved a visit to Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles a professor of history at Yale University 19,, At the end of nineteen century, people were using electricity even they didn't understand what it was , This is tube, which I believe is a copy of the one made by the Siemens Company Which was the one that put been used by Roentgen 1895, Roentgen was a German physicist William Roentgen.
in 1895, he was in an experiment with a cathode ray tube , And a vacuum glass cylinder, a vacuum tube Roentgen marveled that glow created by the rays coming from the tube ,, For one of his experiments, roentgen enclosed the tube in a black cardboard and darkened the room Then he turned on the tube Moments later, something startled him A photographic plate in his lab was glowing So he realized that something was unusual with what's going on He knew that whatever the ray that was coming out was not the cathode ray He also discovered that it didn't respond to magnetism.
It couldn't deflect the way you could cathode rays It was something altogether new "X", and he called it X for unknown Oh, like algebra, absolutely ,X Roentgen had accidentally discovered the radiation unknown to science which he called X-rays , After having been rather mysterious for several weeks, he called his wife down :, He said: Bertha let me show you what I am doing because no one is going to believe that , And he handle put her hand under the ray and he took an image of her hand Well the image was a lot like this picture And she was reputed to said: I have seen my own death Because known as days you only saw a skeleton after someone who died , The idea that seen part of the body on an image of a living person just , Beyond anybody's imagination.
Yes It was as if a secret door had been opened, revealing a hidden universe Roentgen had discovered a powerful new technology, one that let to our revolution in medical diagnostics X In the history of science, the discovery of X-rays is the only discovery that was made when no one was looking for.
It was totally by chance ,,, But as important, once has been discovered, it was accepted by everyone in the world.
It was no controversy Within a week or two our world have changed ,, Today, the legacy of roentgen's discovery can be found in the powerful technology that followed its wake From the CT SCAN that helps diagnose what else it is NASAX To NASA'S Chandra's x-ray telescope X which astronomers are using to detect x-rays from the further of the space.
All form a discovery that happened by accident ,X Some discoveries like X-rays seemed to come out of blue While others like our next great discovery developed over time with one scientist contributing the work on another 1846, Vienna 1846, a city of beauty and culture But Vienna general hospital, there was the specter of death Many of the women who came here to give the birth were dying, , the cause, childbed fever, an infection of uterus When doctor Ignaz Semmelweis came to work at the hospital, he was alarmed the scope of the problem And intrigued by a curious discrepancy 2, They had two wards, and one the mothers were delivered by physicians , And the others, the mothers have the baby delivered by midwifes Semmelweis noticed that the word with the physicians to deliver the babies 7% 7 percent of the mothers died from what was called childbed fever ,2% And the word with midwives delivered only two percent of the mothers who died from childbed fever , And he was bothered because physicians had more training.
They are supposed to do better about their patients Semmelweis was determined to find out what was going on He noticed that one of the main things that physicians did that midwives did not to Was to conducted autopsy on these mothers after they died Did they go back and deliver babies and examined mothers without washing their hands Just like Motor Mechanic who had finished up one car and ,, moved to the next car without washing his hands' grease soil.
He didn't see any reason to have to did this Semmelweis wondered if the doctor was carrying some invisible matter on their hands , Which they passed on to their maternity patients, causing them to die , To find out, he conducted a test He decided that he would have this student physicians under his control wash their hands in a chlorine solution 1%, And suddenly, the percentage of maternal death dropped to one percent, that's lower than the midwives' With this demonstration, Semmelweis realized that infectious disease in this case the childbed fever has a single cause, , If you limited the source of infection, the disease is not occurred 1846, But in 1846, no one had made the connection between bacteria and infections As a result, Semmelweis's idea was ignored 10, It would take ten more years before another scientist would turn his attention to germs His name, Louis Pasteur Pasteur had lost his three of five children to typhoid fever Which perhaps explained why he was determined to find the cause of infectious diseases It was Pasteur's work on behalf of the beer and wine industry that put them on the right track Pasteur was trying to find out what was spoiling so much of the counties' wine production , He discovered that the spoiled wine was contaminated by microorganism, germs And the germs were causing the wine to sour , But would a simple heat treatment, he showed that the germ could be killed off and the wine save Pasteurization was born So when he came to finding the cause of infectious and contagious disease Pasteur knew where to look Germs he said caused specific diseases and he proved it through a series of experiments and demonstrations That led to his great discovery, germ theory The germ theory literally marks the beginning of the modern medicine The germ theory has one central idea that one microorganism causes one disease in everybody Our next great discovery happened in the nineteenth century When smallpox killed estimated forty million people around the world , Doctors were unable to find the cause or discovered a cure But in a small English village Talked of somehow local to immune the smallpox got the attention of a country doctor Edward Jenner It was said that the villagers who worked in the diary business were save from smallpox because they have been already been infected by cowpox A related but less severe disease that inflated cattle , Cowpox victim suffered fever and sores on their hands But little else Jenner studied the phenomena and began to wonder if the pus in the cowpox was somehow responsible for protecting against smallpox 1796514, On may fourteen 1796, during an outbreak of smallpox He decided to test his theory Jenner withdrew pus cowpox from sores on the hands of dairymaid Then he visited another family in the village He inoculated the healthy eight-year old boy with the cowpox virus Confident in the outcome ,, In the days that followed, the boy developed a slight fever and some cowpox blisters Then recovered 6, Six weeks later, Jenner returned This time, he inoculated the boy with smallpox.
Then waited The moment of success or failure was at hand , Within days, Jenner had his answer , The boy was completely healthy, resistant to smallpox Vaccination for smallpox was revolutionary , because it represent people's attempt to intervene the disease process to prevent it upfront This is the first time a man product had been used actively to prevent disease before it occurred 30, Fifty years after Jenner's discovery, Louis Pasteur pushed the concept of vaccination even further Developing vaccine against rabies and humans and anthrax in sheep 20, At the twenty century, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin independently developed vaccine against polio And we all own to Jenner's great discovery Our next great discovery depended on the contribution of researchers working independently on the same problem over many years Throughout history, scurvy was a painful disease that inflicted sailors with hemorrhage and skin lesions 1747, Finally in 1747, a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind found the remedy He discovered that the scurvy could be prevented by including citrus fruits in the sailor's diet Another disease afflicted sailors was beriberi, , a degenerated disease that attacks the nerve heart and digestive system 19, Until the nineteen century, a Dutch physician named Christiaan Ekman traced its cause in diet Including polished white rice rather than unpolished brown rice Well both these discoveries indicated a link between disease and dietary deficiency , It wasn't until the work of British biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins that the connection became clear Hopkins suspected that our bodies' need certain nutrients that can only be acquired by eating certain food To prove his point, he conducted a series of experiments ,, He fed mice in synthetic diet consisting entirely pure protein, fats, carbohydrate and salts The mice became sick and stop growing , But given a small amount of milk, the mice recovered Hopkins has discovered what he called accessory food factor which later came to be known as vitamins ,B1 Beriberi turned out caused by deficiency of thiamin, vitamin B1 , Which was lost in polished rice but plentiful in natural grain ,C And citrus prevent scurvy because it contain a ascorbic acid, vitamin C Hopkins's discovery was a major shift in our understanding of the importance of nutrition Vitamins are responsible for so many of our bodies' normal functions Everything from fighting infection to regulating metabolism It's hard to imagine life without them just like our next great discovery 1000, World War 1, more than ten million died, many from infection of their wounds After the war, researchers intensified to find the save method of repelling the bacteria invaders Among those on the case was Scottish physician Alexander Fleming While studying staphylococci bacteria, Fleming noticed something unusual growing in the culture dish , A mould, penicillin motatium He thought that the bacteria surrounding the mould had died off Which let him to speculate the mould was producing a substance that was lethal to the bacteria He named the substance penicillin For the next several years, Fleming tried extracting to penicillin applying to treat infections , But he was unsuccessful, and eventually gave up Fleming's work however proved invaluable 1935, In 1935, scientist Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at oxford university , Came across a record of Fleming's curious but incomplete work with penicillin and decided to investigated This time, they successfully extracted the purified penicillin And in 1940 they tested it The injected 8 mice with lethal doses of the bacteria streptococcus Then they injected four of the mice with penicillin Within hours they beheld the results The four mice not treated with the penicillin were died But the three of four that had been given penicillin were alive Form Fleming and Florey and chain, the world's first antibiotic was born It was a miracle drug.
It cured so many diseases that had caused so much pain and suffering ,,, Stretch through rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, syphilis and gonorrhea It would things that we could think about today will kill you Our next great discovery came to rescue in the World War 2 It provided soldier with the drugs to fight dysentery while they fought themselves in south pacific Eventually, it also led to a revolutionary chemotherapeutic treatment of bacterial infection The scientist to made it all happened was pathologist Dumak 1932, In 1932, Dumak was studying the potential medical application of some new chemical dyes Working with the newly synthesize chemical dye called prontosil, Dumak injected it into some lab mice that were infected with streptococcus bacteria The dye attached the bacteria just as Dumak had hoped But the bacteria survived The dye he seemed wasn't toxic enough Then something startling happened , While the dyed didn't kill the bacteria, it did inhibit their growth , The spread of the infection were stopped.
The mice recovered It's not clear when Dumak first used prontosil on a human patient But the new drug achieved fame when it saved the life of a boy seriously infected with streptococcus -, The patient's name, Franklin D Roosevelt junior, son of the president of the United States , From that moment on dumark's discovery was a sensation Because prontosil contain what was known as sulfonamide molecular structure , It was called a sulfur drug, the first of its kind A synthetical chemical substance that could cure and prevent bacterial infection Dumak had opened the door to a revolutionary new approach in a treatment of disease The use of chemotherapeutic drugs, a discovery that would go on to save tens of thousands of lives Our next great discovery helped save the lives of millions worldwide who were afflicted with diabetes Diabetes is a disease that disrupt the body's mechanism for processing sugar .
, Which can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart disease even death ,, For centuries, physicians studied diabetes searching in vain for cure Finally in late eighteen hundreds, a breakthrough occurred It was discovered that the bodies of diabetes had something in common A group of cells in pancreas was always damaged These cells produced hormones that control blood sugar, that hormone is called insulin Then in 1920, another breakthrough Canadian surgeon Frederick Banting and a graduate student named Charles Best Were studying how insulin was produced in the pancreas of dogs On a hunch, Banting took an extract from the insulin producing cells of healthy dog And injected the extract into other dogs already afflicted with diabetes The results were astounding , Within a few hours the blood sugar levels of the diabetic dogs decreased significantly Now, Banting and his team set their sights on finding animals whose insulin were closely resembles to human's insulin They found a close match of insulin taken from cow , Purified for save treatment, then in January 1922, conducted the first clinical trial Banting administed the insulin to a fourteen year-old boy dying of diabetes And the boy made a dramatic recovery How important was Banting's discovery Why not ask be estimated thirteen million Americans who rely on insulin to control their diabetes everyday Cancer The second leading cause of death in the United States Intensify research of its origin development has spond remarkable scientific breakthroughs Perhaps no more significant than our next great discovery , 2 To find out about the discovery, I caught up with two Nobel Prize winning cancer researchers (1989) Michael Bishop and Harold Eliot Varmus at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City Varmus and bishop first joined forces to research cancer in the nineteen seventies At the time, there were several prevailing theories about the cause of the disease Malignant cells are complicated.
It's not just the self can replicate, definitely it can invade, , Enlist new blood vessel that has very complex capability One theory concerned the Rous 'sarcoma virus, a virus that cause cancer in chickens When the virus attacked the cells of the chicken DNA It inserted its genetic material into the hosted DNA ,DNA According to the theory the viral DNA later became a cancer causing agent A second theory suggested that once the Rous 'sarcoma virus inserted its genetic material into the hosted cell , The cancer causing genes didn't activate themselves but remained dormant until trigger by outside influences ,, Such as harmful chemicals radiation or even viral infections , This cancer causing genes called oncogene became the focus of Varmus and bishop's research The fundamental question was Does a human cell, dose the human genome contain genes that are or capable of becoming ocogene the sort of the virus Tumor causing genes.
Tumor causing genes.
--, Cancer causing genes.
Right.
Are they in there or not So what did you discoverer , First we started with the chicken because that's where this virus came from Is there gene in chickens Later is the gene in other birds in mammals in humans Related to the cancer gene of Rous 'sarcoma The way we did is to make a radioactive molecule that could be used as a probe For asking whether the Rous 'sarcoma virus genes are come of virus resembled a normal gene present in the chromosomes of a chicken And the answer was yes It was a landmark discovery DNA Varmus and bishop found that the cancer causing genes were always present in the DNA of normal uninfected chicken cells , DNA Even more remarkable, they found in human DNA as well Proof that the seeds of cancer may already be in each of us as the cellular level just waiting to be activated How can one of our own genes which we have our all lives cause cancer When cell divide, mistakes are made They are more frequent if the cells are stressed by , A cosmic rays, cigarette smoke , Cigarette smoke, it's a good example 30DNA it's important also to recognize cell divide they had to copy three billion base pair of DNA And anybody ever try to types on, they know it's not easy to do that we have spell check mechanism that would allow detect the mistakes, repair the mistakes , But still things look through when you things onto a large scale So why is this a great discovery That the difference between the gene in the virus and gene in the cell Exemplifies the fundamental way people were trying to think about cancer And we now do think about cancer that small changes in particular genes in our cells can convert cells from control regular growth to another behavior to the behavior of malignant cell And this was really the first direct illustration of that sort of thing Is modern cancer research a result of your discovery At a fundamental platform which almost all molecular approach of cancers built , And indeed some of runs the cancer in hospital Were excited to meet the moment to see how understanding of cancer the molecular and genetic level Is influencing the way in which we treat a lot of our patients , Why is it important Looking for this kind of gene is vital in diagnostics now It's vital in prediction of how cancers are going to behave ,, And above all it is vital because it's provide its targets for truly specific therapy, that we simply didn't have before The city of Chicago, population of three million, the same number of people who are dying each year from AIDS One of the worst epidemics in modern history The first clues about the disease emerged in the early nineteen eighties , Researchers in the United States reported that a rising number of patients were dying form weird infections and cancers Blood samples revealed that the patients had extremely low level of CD for T lymphocyte , White blood cell vital to the immune system 1982, In 1982, the center for disease control and prevention gave the disease a name AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Two researchers took up the case Luc Montagnier At the institute of pasture in Paris And Robert Gallo cancer institute outside Washington DC Both shared the credit for breakthrough discovery ,HIV that eventually uncover the cause of AIDS, HIV human immunodeficiency virus What is the difference about human immunodeficiency virus from another virus like the flu or something , 7 First, the virus doesn't give evidence of disease for years; let's take an average, seven years Second, probably that was rather unique, by the time a person presented themselves with AIDS You know, I am sick, I am goanna to the hospital They had a myriad of other infections What was the cause Hard to demonstrate which one of these is the cause of the disease , In most cases of virus exist for one purpose , To infect the whole cell and reproduce , Typically it attached itself to the host and released its genetic information into the cell This enables the virus to take over the cell's normal functions, redirecting them to produce new virus particles , These particles and then released to attack more cells HIV HIV is not a conventional virus, it belonged to the family virus that category virus as that scientists call retroviruses How are retroviruses different It just like the virus class that includes Polio or virus class include influence retroviruses are another type of viruses What unique about retroviruses is that we might say the definition of retrovirus RNADNA Is each genetic information in the form of RNA is converted into DNA DNA But is what happens to DNA that gives us the problem Then what is it DNA The DNA gets incorporate into our genes, DNA the DNA of the virus becomes a part of us -T DNA As the we produce, they are reproducing with virus the retrovirus's DNA in them.
- Exactly Forever, you never get over it You get code harboring the genetic information of the virus, ,,, sometimes making you virus others silence, quit, perhaps hidden , But only later to pump out and reproduce virus again.
, I mean very rapidly upon infection or establishing, the infection is likely to be life long That's what, that's the crocks of the issue for me.
HIV A cure for HIV remained elusive HIV But to discovery HIV is retrovirus and that HIV caused AIDS has led to breakthrough Fight against the disease and beyond What's the change in medicine since the discovery of retroviruses or more specifically discovery of this viruses AIDS has been the lead ship and showing that anti-drug therapy is possible , In general it was thought, because the viruses insert the cell, our cells for how they reproduce themselves It would be nearly impossible to target them effectively without poisoning a person badly You are saying that nobody would investing if I mean anti-virus , AIDS has opened the door the anti-virus research in the pharmaceutical companies and the universities broadly across the world , AIDS has also been puzzled us sociologically I witnessed firsthand a difference between developing and developed nations , You can't just drop the drugs in the beach and run home and requires the training how the use the drugs and have that relationship with several Africa countries now --,.
so this is irony, this horrible disease is actually bringing people together, - I think so.
Thanks to the discoveries we just seen, the world has changed , From germ theory to uncovering the origins of cancer.
These breakthroughs have altered the course of history Saving countless lives And pushing the boundaries of our medical knowledge to where we are today Ready for the next breakthrough, the next great discovery