1944 - Medicine

Medicine

Rutgers biochemist Selman A. Waksman introduces the antibiotic streptomycin (see 1943). Discovered by Waksman in collaboration with Albert Schatz and E. Bugie of Merck & Co., the drug is a much broader spectrum antibiotic than penicillin, meaning that it can be used to kill many gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria that penicillin cannot stop (although penicillin is used to treat thousands of wounded Allied troops on D-Day). Pencillin has not been able to kill tubercle bacilli, but Mayo Clinic researchers at Rochester, Minn., use streptomycin November 20 to treat a 21-year-old woman dying of advanced pulmonary TB and find it highly effective. Waksman persuades George W. Merck, now 50, of Merck & Co. to waive the company's contractual provision for "sole right" to develop streptomycin commercially, but Merck will be the leading producer of the antibiotic.

Quinine is synthesized by Harvard chemist Robert B. (Burns) Woodward and Columbia chemist William (von Eggers) Doering, both 26 (see 1820).

Dutch physician Willem J. Kolff, 33, devises the first kidney machine to filter noxious wastes out of the blood of patients with kidney disease. He uses the clinical apparatus in secret to save the lives of Dutch partisans in German-occupied Holland. A surgical operation is required to insert the machine's large tubes into an artery and vein, and the machine is used only for brief emergency treatment of waste-product buildup (see Scribner, 1960).

Halifax, N.S.-born University of Chicago surgeon Charles B. (Brenton) Huggins, 42, performs the first complete removal of the adrenal glands to save a cancer patient. His research has shown him that the growth of prostate cancer can be arrested by removing the testes or administering female sex hormones, real or synthetic, to lower the levels of androgens (male sex hormones), but he has recognized that in some cases the cancer has recurred because the adrenal glands were compensating for the loss of androgens in patients who had been treated.

A typhus epidemic threatens Naples, but widespread spraying of DDT kills the lice responsible (see Müller, 1939).

Swiss-born pharmacologist Daniel Bovet, 37, of the Pasteur Institut at Paris develops an improved antihistamine (see Halpern, 1942). By countering the action of a histamine, pyrilamine (mepyramine) proves effective against allergic reactions, but it has side effects that researchers will work for more than 50 years to combat as they develop newer generation antihistamines.

The National Institutes of Health at Washington, D.C., hears in June of a mysterious disease that has killed an 11-year-old boy in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, N.Y. Victims suffer violent, body-racking fevers and skin lesions. The only Public Health Service officer on duty is Ohio-born physician Robert J. (Joseph) Huebner, 30, who served until last year as a medical officer on a Coast Guard vessel in Alaska. He rushes to New York, a local exterminator shows him an apartment whose walls are crawling with mites, Huebner finds that Russian immigrants have unwittingly brought the mites into the country with their luggage, and he identifies the disease as rickettsialpox, one of many diseases caused by the microscopic rickettsia pathogens carried by mites (see Ricketts, 1906). The Public Health Service sends Huebner to California to investigate an outbreak of Q-fever, which was first discovered in 1930 and has spread from cows to humans; he finds other members of the rickettsia family in vats of unpasteurized milk, but dairy farmers take offense and put pressure on state health authorities to send Huebner back to Washington (see adenovirus, 1953).

Nobel surgeon Alexis Carrel dies of heart failure in occupied Paris November 5 at age 71. Having developed a technique for blood transfusion (but with no knowledge of blood types), he has done research on the prolongation of life and helped English chemist Henry Dakin, now 64, to develop Dakin's Solution (a 0.5 percent solution of sodium hypochlorite) that found wide use for sterilizing deep wounds in World War I. U.S. military personnel wounded in battle have an estimated 85 percent chance of recovery if reached by medics within 90 minutes of being hit—a rate roughly three times better than that in World War I.

The first operation to save a "blue baby" is performed November 9 at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital by Georgia-born surgeon Alfred Blalock, 45, who proceeds on the premise advanced by his Cambridge, Mass.-born colleague Helen Taussig, 46, that bypassing the pulmonary artery can cure anoxemia. Prevented by a congenital pulmonary artery defect from getting enough blood into their lungs, many infants have been born blue, grown progressively weaker, and either died or been doomed to chronic invalidism. The surgical technique developed by Blalock and Taussig will permit blue babies to live normal lives (and have normal color).