The “Right stuff”: Five Nobel prize-winning surgeons

1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 241
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 313 (4) ◽  
pp. L651-L658 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. West

The early history of cardiac catheterization has many interesting features. First, although it would be natural to assume that the procedure was initiated by cardiologists, two of the three people who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery were pulmonologists, while the third was a urologist. The primary objective of the pulmonologists André Cournand and Dickinson Richards was to obtain mixed venous blood from the right heart so that they could use the Fick principle to calculate total pulmonary blood flow. Cournand’s initial catheterization studies were prompted by his reading of an account by Werner Forssmann, who catheterized himself 12 years before. His bold experiment was one of the most bizarre in medical history. In the earliest studies that followed, Cournand and colleagues first passed catheters into the right atrium, and then into the right ventricle, and finally, the pulmonary artery. At the time, the investigators did not appreciate the significance of the low vascular pressures, nor that what they had done would revolutionize interventional cardiology. Within a year, William Dock predicted that there would be a very low blood flow at the top of the upright lung, and he proposed that this was the cause of the apical localization of pulmonary tuberculosis. The fact that the pulmonary vascular pressures are very low has many implications in lung disease. Cardiac catheterization changed the face of investigative cardiology, and its instigators were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956.


1990 ◽  
Vol 77 (8) ◽  
pp. 944-953 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon B. Morris ◽  
William J. Schirmer
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Kholhring Lalchhandama

Alexander Fleming, a Scottish physician at the St. Mary’s Hospital, London, made two epoch-making discoveries, lysozyme and penicillin. But contrary to popular fables, the events were not that serendipitous. He was already an established microbiologist and it took him dogged labours to vindicate his discoveries. He simply had the right mind. Penicillin was especially a hard nut to crack upon which he toiled for half a year with his associates just enough to make a convincing conclusion on the antibacterial property. He in fact utterly failed in understanding what it actually was. As he himself unpretentiously stated: “I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.” But that did not debar him for sharing the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, who isolated the compound and worked out the medicinal applications. Strangely, Fleming’s biography has been presented in bits and pieces on the crucial elements of his discoveries, and usually contradictory. This chronicle is trying to mend the gaps and broken pieces in the historical records.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 46-50
Author(s):  
Sushil Ghimire

Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, is the first excellent Indian author whose creative efforts-poetry, prose, drama-present a superb Triveni of, mysticism, humanism and philosophy. His significant dance play Chandalika reveals the theme of marginal(Dalit) voice and role of Buddhism in the play. The play displays a chandal girl's realization that she's a human being like any other and it's wrong for her to believe under the notice of people from the upper castes. This play is about awakening a feeling of her identity in a Chandal-woman, and its awakened realization that she was born as a chandal-woman does not imply she is a non-entity. Prakriti finds that she is as human as anyone else, and that she has the right to give water to anyone high or low who requests that. Chandal girl in this play realizes that she isn't just someone with a personal identity but also causes her to love a Buddhist monk who is accountable for this new awakening.


1970 ◽  
pp. 4-5
Author(s):  
Rose Ghurayyib

Iman Khalifeh, initiator of the Peace Movement in Lebanon will be going to Stockhom on the 7th of December 1984 to receive, together with three other women from India, the Philippines and Kenya, the Right to Livelihood Alternative Nobel Prize for Peace.


Author(s):  
Janet R. Gilsdorf

This book explores the lives and work of scientists who unraveled the mysteries of meningitis and describes the steps (and sometimes missteps) they used to accomplish their splendid achievements. Although symptoms of meningitis were recorded as early as the time of Hippocrates, its origin remained obscure. Then, in 1892, one of the bacteria that cause meningitis in children, Haemophilus influenzae, was discovered when Richard Pfeiffer saw it in material coughed up by a patient with influenza. Pfeiffer mistakenly thought the bacteria caused influenza, and it has carried that unfortunate, erroneous name since that time. Discovery, however, marched forward, and Quincke discovered how to obtain spinal fluid by inserting a needle between two bones in the patient’s back. Pittman discovered the sugar overcoat that protects H. influenzae from being eaten by white blood cells. Flexner managed epidemics of meningitis with serum from a horse. Griffith unknowingly stumbled on DNA, the master of all life. Weech gave the first antibiotic used in America to a little girl with meningitis. Alexander learned why antibiotics sometimes fail in such patients. Smith won the Nobel Prize for showing how DNA invades bacteria, the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. And four scientists, in two teams, vied to be the first to create the best vaccine to prevent meningitis in infants.


Author(s):  
J. Anthony VanDuzer

SummaryRecently, there has been a proliferation of international agreements imposing minimum standards on states in respect of their treatment of foreign investors and allowing investors to initiate dispute settlement proceedings where a state violates these standards. Of greatest significance to Canada is Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which provides both standards for state behaviour and the right to initiate binding arbitration. Since 1996, four cases have been brought under Chapter 11. This note describes the Chapter 11 process and suggests some of the issues that may arise as it is increasingly resorted to by investors.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Gainotti

Abstract The target article carefully describes the memory system, centered on the temporal lobe that builds specific memory traces. It does not, however, mention the laterality effects that exist within this system. This commentary briefly surveys evidence showing that clear asymmetries exist within the temporal lobe structures subserving the core system and that the right temporal structures mainly underpin face familiarity feelings.


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