In 2002, Greenpeace held a protest against a cargo ship smuggling illegal mahogany wood from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest into a Miami port. In swift response, Attorney General John Ashcroft prosecuted Greenpeace, and leveled no charges at the smugglers.
A mild burn, run under cold tap water for 10 minutes, (do not use ice). A first degree burn, leave alone 24 hours, do not cover and avoid any product application. A second degree burn, apply antibiotic ointment and cover with sterile dressing. If blisters break open clean with tap water. A third degree burn, needs immediate medical attention. Have person lie down, and cover burn with clean sheet, until medical professional arrives.
Swami Sivananda ran a free medical dispensary.
Charles Darwin dropped out of medical school.
Fish skin, usually from Atlantic cod or Nile tilapia, has anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties that support healing of some wounds including burns and diabetic foot ulcers.
On October 16, 1846, dentist William Morton gave the first public demonstration of surgery using ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, a date now called "Ether Day."
Georgia doctor Crawford Long used ether during surgery in 1842 but didn't publish his results until years later.
Queen Victoria used chloroform during childbirth in 1853, which helped make anesthesia socially acceptable.
The word "anesthesia" was suggested by physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Ancient Chinese physician Hua Tuo is said to have used an herbal anesthetic for surgery.
Dentist Horace Wells tried to demonstrate nitrous oxide anesthesia in 1845, but the patient cried out and the demonstration was considered a failure.
Scientists still don't fully understand exactly how general anesthesia makes people unconscious.
Before anesthesia, surgeons were valued for speed, and some could amputate a leg in under three minutes.
Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū performed surgery under general anesthesia in 1804.
The American Society of Anesthesiologists was founded in 1905.
German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays by accident in 1895.
One of the first X-ray images ever taken showed the bones of Röntgen's wife's hand, with her wedding ring.
X-rays got their name because "X" stood for an unknown type of radiation.
Wilhelm Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for discovering X-rays.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, many shoe stores used X-ray machines to check how shoes fit.
Wilhelm Röntgen refused to patent his X-ray discovery.
Godfrey Hounsfield invented the CT scanner in 1971 at EMI, the record company that also released the Beatles' music.
Many airport baggage scanners use X-rays.
X-rays can reveal hidden paintings underneath famous artworks.
Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image called Photo 51 helped reveal the structure of DNA.
Robert Koch identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in 1882, and World Tuberculosis Day is held on March 24, the anniversary of his announcement.
In 1854, physician John Snow traced a London cholera outbreak to a public water pump on Broad Street and had its handle removed.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first saw bacteria in the 1670s and called them "animalcules."
Before germ theory, many people believed diseases were caused by "bad air," called miasma.
Koch's postulates are rules for proving that a specific germ causes a specific disease.
Louis Pasteur used swan-neck flasks to disprove the idea that life appears spontaneously.
The petri dish was invented by Julius Petri in 1887, and Fanny Hesse suggested using agar to grow bacteria in it.
The Pasteur Institute was founded in Paris in 1887.
Germ theory showed that many diseases are caused by microorganisms.
In 1847, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis showed that handwashing reduced deaths among new mothers, but many doctors rejected his idea.
British surgeon Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery in 1867 using carbolic acid.
Listerine mouthwash, created in 1879, is named after Joseph Lister.
Surgeon William Halsted introduced rubber surgical gloves in 1889 to protect his nurse's hands from harsh chemicals. She later became his wife.
Surgeons once wore bloody coats as a badge of experience.
Florence Nightingale used statistics and diagrams to show that poor sanitation was killing soldiers in hospitals.
Global Handwashing Day is October 15.
The "Semmelweis reflex" is the tendency to reject new evidence that goes against established beliefs.
Surgical masks were first used in the late 1890s.
Joseph Lister was the first medical doctor to be made a member of the House of Lords in Britain.
Insulin was discovered by Frederick Banting and Charles Best in Toronto in 1921.
The first person treated with insulin was 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, in 1922.
Frederick Banting and John Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize for discovering insulin, and Banting shared his prize money with Charles Best.
The inventors sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for $1 each.
Early insulin was made from the pancreases of cows and pigs.
Genetically engineered human insulin was approved in 1982.
World Diabetes Day is November 14, Frederick Banting's birthday.
Frederick Sanger won a Nobel Prize for working out the structure of insulin.
Frederick Banting was 32 when he won the Nobel Prize, making him the youngest winner in physiology or medicine.
Banting House in London, Ontario, is called the "Birthplace of Insulin."
Karl Landsteiner discovered the main human blood types in 1901 and won the Nobel Prize in 1930.
Some of the first blood transfusions, in the 1660s, used blood from animals like lambs.
Charles Drew pioneered blood banking and plasma storage during WWII.
The first hospital blood bank in the US opened at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1937, and its founder coined the term "blood bank."
O negative is the universal donor blood type.
One blood donation can help up to three people.
Australian James Harrison, known as "the man with the golden arm," donated plasma more than 1,000 times, and it was used to make a treatment that protects babies.
Someone in the US needs blood about every two seconds.
The "Rh" in Rh factor comes from rhesus monkeys.
Donated red blood cells can be stored for about 42 days.
French doctor René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 after rolling up paper to listen to a patient's heart.
The word "stethoscope" comes from Greek words meaning "chest" and "examine."
The first stethoscope was a wooden tube for one ear.
Stethoscopes with two earpieces appeared in the 1850s.
Cardiologist David Littmann designed a popular modern stethoscope in the 1960s.
The stethoscope is a widely recognized symbol of doctors.
Digital stethoscopes can record heart sounds and use AI to help find problems.
Studies have found that stethoscopes can carry bacteria.
A Pinard horn is a simple instrument for listening to a baby's heartbeat before birth.
René Laennec's stethoscope helped doctors diagnose lung and heart diseases.
James Watson and Francis Crick described DNA's double helix structure in 1953, using X-ray data from Rosalind Franklin.
The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003 and cost about $2.7 billion.
Humans have about 20,000 protein-coding genes.
Sequencing a human genome now costs about $1,000 or less.
Scientists published the first complete, gap-free human genome sequence in 2022.
The DNA in one human cell would stretch about two meters if uncoiled.
Humans share about 99.9% of their DNA with each other.
Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher first discovered DNA in 1869.
Francis Crick described DNA's structure in a 1953 letter to his son.
Alec Jeffreys invented DNA fingerprinting in 1984.
The first successful kidney transplant was performed in 1954 between identical twins in Boston, and surgeon Joseph Murray later won a Nobel Prize.
The first partial face transplant was performed in France in 2005.
In 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a gene-edited pig kidney into a living patient.
One organ donor can save up to eight lives.
More than 100,000 people in the US are on the organ transplant waiting list.
Cyclosporine, approved in 1983, made organ transplants much more successful by preventing rejection.
The cornea is one of the most commonly transplanted tissues.
The first hand transplant was performed in France in 1998.
The first baby born after a uterus transplant was born in Sweden in 2014.
Thomas Starzl performed the first human liver transplant in 1963.
Arne Larsson received the first implanted pacemaker in Sweden in 1958 and went on to use 26 different devices before dying at 86.
Wilson Greatbatch invented the implantable pacemaker partly by accident after using the wrong resistor in a circuit.
Early pacemakers were external and had to be plugged into a wall outlet.
Leadless pacemakers can be about the size of a large vitamin capsule.
Pacemaker batteries usually last about 7 to 15 years.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney had his heart device's wireless feature disabled to prevent hacking.
About a million pacemakers are implanted worldwide each year.
Earl Bakken, founder of Medtronic, invented a battery-powered wearable pacemaker in 1957 after a power outage.
Modern pacemakers can send data to doctors remotely.
Pacemakers commonly use lithium iodide batteries.
Raymond Damadian performed the first full-body MRI scan of a human in 1977.
Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield won the 2003 Nobel Prize for MRI.
MRI scans don't use ionizing radiation.
MRI machines make loud banging noises.
MRI was originally called "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging," but "nuclear" was dropped to avoid scaring patients.
MRI magnets are thousands of times stronger than Earth's magnetic field.
Metal objects can be pulled into an MRI machine by its powerful magnet.
fMRI measures brain activity by tracking blood flow.
A 2009 study scanned a dead salmon with fMRI to show how statistical errors can produce false results.
France's Iseult MRI scanner produced its first images of the human brain in 2024.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR.
CRISPR gene editing is adapted from a natural immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses.
Casgevy, approved in 2023, was the first CRISPR treatment, used for sickle cell disease.
Chinese scientist He Jiankui was imprisoned after creating gene-edited babies in 2018.
CRISPR stands for "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats."
Spanish scientist Francisco Mojica discovered CRISPR sequences in bacteria in the 1990s.
CRISPR patents have been the subject of a long legal battle.
In 2025, a baby known as KJ became one of the first people treated with a personalized gene-editing therapy.
Japan approved a CRISPR-edited tomato in 2021.
Cas9 is the enzyme that acts like molecular scissors in CRISPR.
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