WEBVTT - How Have Hispanic Scientists Changed the World? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:08.680 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Vohllebaum. Here, 0:00:10.039 --> 0:00:12.959 it's Hispanic Heritage Month here in the United States, which 0:00:13.000 --> 0:00:15.480 is an excellent excuse to talk about some of the 0:00:15.520 --> 0:00:19.320 most world changing scientists who came from these Spanish speaking 0:00:19.360 --> 0:00:22.600 countries of the Americas. Though you don't have to twist 0:00:22.600 --> 0:00:27.200 our arms to talk about awesome scientists around here. First up, 0:00:27.400 --> 0:00:32.599 let's talk about Carlos Juan Finlay. Okay, before Google doodles, 0:00:32.640 --> 0:00:37.000 we honored important figures with postage stamps. Finlay, the physician 0:00:37.080 --> 0:00:40.360 who first linked yellow fever to Mosquitos in eighteen eighty one, 0:00:40.680 --> 0:00:45.000 has received both tributes. Given the innumerable lives he saved 0:00:45.040 --> 0:00:48.400 in the decades of scorn he endured for this radical link, 0:00:48.640 --> 0:00:52.839 we'd say he more than deserves them. Born in Cuba 0:00:52.880 --> 0:00:56.200 in eighteen thirty three, Finlay studied abroad before returning to 0:00:56.200 --> 0:00:59.520 Havana as a general practitioner and optomologist with a penchant 0:00:59.520 --> 0:01:03.680 for scientifce research. At the time, yellow fever was ravaging 0:01:03.760 --> 0:01:08.080 the Tropics. This confounding infection caused a short flu like 0:01:08.120 --> 0:01:11.200 illness in most people who caught it, but in some 0:01:11.920 --> 0:01:14.600 just when their symptoms seemed to be improving, they'd be 0:01:14.760 --> 0:01:18.760 slammed with jaundiced yellow skin from liver damage. An internal 0:01:18.760 --> 0:01:22.360 bleeding would issue from the mouth, nose, and eyes. It 0:01:22.560 --> 0:01:27.200 terrorized populations and disrupted all walks of life, including in Havana. 0:01:28.800 --> 0:01:32.800 Finlay noticed that yellow fever epidemics roughly coincided with Havana's 0:01:32.880 --> 0:01:37.039 mosquito season, but his mosquito transmission hypothesis was met with 0:01:37.160 --> 0:01:41.600 disdain for decades until he convinced American military surgeon Walter 0:01:41.760 --> 0:01:44.880 Reed to look into it. Yes that Walter Reed, who 0:01:44.880 --> 0:01:48.840 the hospital was named for. Reed and his colleagues, who 0:01:48.840 --> 0:01:51.120 had been dispatched to Cuba to fight the disease that 0:01:51.160 --> 0:01:53.880 had killed so many soldiers during the Spanish American War, 0:01:54.400 --> 0:01:58.160 helped Finlay refine his experiments and verify that a mosquito 0:01:58.400 --> 0:02:01.920 was indeed the culprit. Yellow fever was wiped out of 0:02:01.960 --> 0:02:06.040 Cuba and Panama by controlling mosquito populations, enabling engineers to 0:02:06.080 --> 0:02:11.480 finally complete the Panama Canal. This work led eventually to 0:02:11.520 --> 0:02:14.680 the discovery of the pathogenic virus that mosquitoes transmit to 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:18.760 cause yellow fever, and the development of a vaccine. Today, 0:02:18.880 --> 0:02:22.600 yellow fever is limited mostly to areas blocking access to vaccines. 0:02:24.760 --> 0:02:28.240 Our next researcher helped change our understanding of how the 0:02:28.240 --> 0:02:32.400 immune system works in the first place. Baru Bnasiroth was 0:02:32.400 --> 0:02:35.920 born in Caracas, Venezuela in nineteen twenty, lived in Paris 0:02:35.919 --> 0:02:37.880 as a youth, and spent most of his life and 0:02:37.960 --> 0:02:41.840 career in America. He became a naturalized citizen in nineteen 0:02:41.880 --> 0:02:44.680 forty three after serving in the US Army wartime medical 0:02:44.720 --> 0:02:48.800 training program that drafted him out of medical school. He 0:02:48.840 --> 0:02:51.520 went on to become an immunologist who studied how our 0:02:51.560 --> 0:02:54.840 immune system knows not to attack our own cells under 0:02:54.880 --> 0:02:59.400 normal circumstances, and why it sometimes attacks transplanted organs and 0:02:59.560 --> 0:03:02.519 even our own cells in the case of autoimmune diseases 0:03:02.639 --> 0:03:08.040 like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Okay, the surfaces of 0:03:08.080 --> 0:03:11.680 our cells team with a unique array of antigens that 0:03:11.800 --> 0:03:15.480 identify those cells as ours and usually prevent our immune 0:03:15.480 --> 0:03:20.000 system from attacking those cells. Binaserroff determined the genetic basis 0:03:20.040 --> 0:03:22.720 of this, which won him the nineteen eighty Nobel Prize 0:03:22.720 --> 0:03:26.240 in Physiology or Medicine and advanced by Leaps and bounds 0:03:26.240 --> 0:03:30.200 are understanding of autoimmune diseases. He shared the Nobel with 0:03:30.240 --> 0:03:33.080 George D. Snell, who uncovered the initial evidence for this 0:03:33.200 --> 0:03:36.400 in mice back in the nineteen forties, and Jean Darcett, 0:03:36.520 --> 0:03:42.760 who was the first researcher to identify a human compatibility antigen. Next, 0:03:42.880 --> 0:03:46.040 let's talk about a researcher who looked into other cellular processes, 0:03:46.400 --> 0:03:50.520 those that fuel our bodies. As much as fad diets 0:03:50.600 --> 0:03:53.480 might tell us to cut out carbs, these energy packed 0:03:53.520 --> 0:03:57.080 molecules are essential to most life thanks to two opposing 0:03:57.160 --> 0:04:00.880 chemical processes, a combustion which allows us to break down 0:04:00.920 --> 0:04:03.920 carbohydrates and release energy needed to make our bodies work, 0:04:04.400 --> 0:04:07.960 and synthesis, which enables us to use various sugars to 0:04:08.040 --> 0:04:13.119 build other substances that we need to live. Before Argentine 0:04:13.120 --> 0:04:17.600 physician and biochemist Luis Federico Leloirre did his groundbreaking research 0:04:17.680 --> 0:04:21.359 into the transformation of one sugar into another, combustion was 0:04:21.400 --> 0:04:27.160 well understood, but synthesis remained a mysterious phenomenon. By isolating 0:04:27.200 --> 0:04:31.480 a new class of substances called sugar nucleotides, leloire found 0:04:31.520 --> 0:04:36.600 the key to deciphering this voluminous backlog of unsolved metabolic reactions. 0:04:37.440 --> 0:04:40.560 A new field of biochemistry opened up virtually over night, 0:04:40.880 --> 0:04:44.320 and Laloire received the nineteen seventy Nobel Prize in Chemistry 0:04:44.360 --> 0:04:47.960 for his work. He was born in Paris to Argentine 0:04:48.040 --> 0:04:50.480 parents in nineteen oh six, and the family moved to 0:04:50.520 --> 0:04:52.960 Buenos Aires when he was two years old, where he'd 0:04:53.000 --> 0:04:55.720 live in work for most of the rest of his life. 0:04:55.800 --> 0:04:59.000 After earning his medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires, 0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:02.279 he worked at the Institut due to Physiology, then established 0:05:02.320 --> 0:05:05.560 the Institute for Biochemical Research, which is where he began 0:05:05.680 --> 0:05:08.840 the research into milkshuters called lactose that would lead to 0:05:08.880 --> 0:05:13.120 his great breakthrough. But let's move out of the human 0:05:13.160 --> 0:05:17.680 body and into the wider world. A quick glance at 0:05:17.760 --> 0:05:21.599 Luis Alvarez's array of research and engineering projects reveals why 0:05:21.640 --> 0:05:26.400 colleagues described him as the prize wild idea man. Just 0:05:26.440 --> 0:05:30.120 a sample. He built US President Eisenhower an indoor golf 0:05:30.160 --> 0:05:34.119 training machine, analyzed the Zeppruder film, which is the color 0:05:34.160 --> 0:05:37.560 film that happened to capture John F. Kennedy's asassination, and 0:05:37.839 --> 0:05:41.560 tried to locate an Egyptian Pyramids treasure chamber using cosmic rays, 0:05:43.600 --> 0:05:46.200 but the large part of his career was spent studying 0:05:46.240 --> 0:05:50.240 subotomic particles in their behavior in situations like radioactive decay 0:05:50.279 --> 0:05:54.440 and interaction with magnetic fields. Born in nineteen eleven in 0:05:54.480 --> 0:05:58.000 San Francisco to Spanish American parents, he had already done 0:05:58.080 --> 0:06:01.039 pioneering work in subatomic particle by the beginning of World 0:06:01.120 --> 0:06:05.520 War II. During the war, he invented several radar applications 0:06:05.560 --> 0:06:09.320 and worked on the Manhattan Project. After that, he worked 0:06:09.360 --> 0:06:12.479 on the first proton linear accelerator and was awarded the 0:06:12.600 --> 0:06:15.240 nineteen sixty eight Nobel Prize in Physics for his work 0:06:15.279 --> 0:06:20.960 with elementary particles. Physicists had already constructed cloud chambers and 0:06:21.040 --> 0:06:25.640 bubble chambers capable of spotting speedy charged particles via condensing 0:06:25.720 --> 0:06:30.840 vapor or boiling liquid, but tiny resonance particles, which exist 0:06:30.960 --> 0:06:33.760 for a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, were 0:06:33.800 --> 0:06:37.640 only detectable by the traces they left behind products of 0:06:37.640 --> 0:06:42.599 disintegration and collision reactions with other particles. Alvarez developed his 0:06:42.640 --> 0:06:46.599 own bubble chamber camera stabilizers and a computerized system for 0:06:46.680 --> 0:06:51.400 analyzing bubble photographs. Together with the linear accelerators that he 0:06:51.400 --> 0:06:56.040 helped invent. These revolutionized the discovery of elemental particles, which 0:06:56.080 --> 0:06:58.200 he and his team went on to discover by the 0:06:58.440 --> 0:07:04.919 tiny truckload. Next we have an environmental scientist, Mario J. Molina, 0:07:05.279 --> 0:07:09.320 born in nineteen forty three in Mexico. A little bit 0:07:09.320 --> 0:07:11.760 of background for this one. The end of the twentieth 0:07:11.800 --> 0:07:15.640 century was marked by the recognition that humans could significantly 0:07:15.640 --> 0:07:19.840 affect the environment, even the Earth itself. But as of 0:07:19.880 --> 0:07:24.520 the early nineteen seventies, beyond localized ecological concerns over things 0:07:24.560 --> 0:07:28.840 like factory pollution or the pesticide DDT and the vaguer 0:07:28.960 --> 0:07:33.200 terror of nuclear winter, we hadn't much considered the potentially 0:07:33.280 --> 0:07:38.080 global consequences of industry. This was especially true in the 0:07:38.080 --> 0:07:41.800 case of chlorofloracarbons or CFCs, which are a group of 0:07:41.840 --> 0:07:44.600 chemicals that are made up of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:47.720 that were found to be useful because they have various 0:07:47.720 --> 0:07:51.800 cool properties and are non toxic and non flammable, so 0:07:52.160 --> 0:07:56.880 they were going into everything from aerosol sprays to refrigerators. 0:07:57.000 --> 0:08:01.680 But in nineteen seventy four, scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. 0:08:01.800 --> 0:08:05.680 Molina argued that CFCs weren't as harmless as they seemed. 0:08:06.440 --> 0:08:09.640 Instead of washing out of the sky through rainfall or oxidation, 0:08:10.120 --> 0:08:13.480 they floated into the upper stratosphere, where ultraviolet waves from 0:08:13.480 --> 0:08:16.320 the sun broke them apart and set off an ozone 0:08:16.320 --> 0:08:21.360 destroying chemical reaction. In nineteen eighty five, the British Antarctica 0:08:21.400 --> 0:08:24.560 Survey detected a hole in the ozone layer, and we've 0:08:24.600 --> 0:08:27.760 been trying to prevent and correct the damage ever since, 0:08:27.960 --> 0:08:30.200 as the ozone is what keeps some of the dangerous 0:08:30.280 --> 0:08:35.040 radiation from the sun out. As a child in Mexico City, 0:08:35.240 --> 0:08:38.480 Molina admired his aunt, a chemist, and emulated her by 0:08:38.480 --> 0:08:42.520 converting a spare bathroom into a makeshift chemistry lab. He 0:08:42.559 --> 0:08:46.120 studied in Mexico and abroad, and made his groundbreaking discovery 0:08:46.120 --> 0:08:49.360 concerning CFCs during his post doctoral stint with Roland at 0:08:49.480 --> 0:08:52.959 University of California, Irvine. The work earned them in the 0:08:53.080 --> 0:08:56.120 nineteen ninety five Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and honor they 0:08:56.160 --> 0:08:59.240 shared with Paul J. Crutzen, a pioneer in studying the 0:08:59.240 --> 0:09:05.560 effects of nitrie oxide on ozone destruction. Our final entry 0:09:05.600 --> 0:09:09.400 today honors engineer Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina to become 0:09:09.440 --> 0:09:12.800 an astronaut. She was born in nineteen fifty eight in 0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:16.199 Los Angeles, California, and earned her master's degree and doctorate 0:09:16.200 --> 0:09:20.320 in electrical engineering from Stanford University. As She went on 0:09:20.400 --> 0:09:24.080 to research information processing at Sandia National Laboratories and the 0:09:24.200 --> 0:09:27.120 NASA Ames Research Center, and she's listed as the co 0:09:27.160 --> 0:09:31.439 inventor on free patents in optics, object recognition, and image processing. 0:09:32.440 --> 0:09:35.400 Ochoa became an astronaut in nineteen ninety one and flew 0:09:35.520 --> 0:09:38.720 four Space Shuttle missions over the next eleven years, spending 0:09:38.760 --> 0:09:42.600 almost one thousand hours in orbit conducting research, including into 0:09:42.679 --> 0:09:46.440 damage to the ozone layer. In twenty thirteen, she was 0:09:46.480 --> 0:09:49.640 promoted to director of the Johnson Space Center, the first 0:09:49.679 --> 0:09:53.679 Hispanic person and second woman to achieve that honor. As 0:09:53.679 --> 0:09:56.920 she eventually retired from NASA to serve on several boards, 0:09:57.000 --> 0:10:00.920 both corporate and nonprofit, aimed at using science to create 0:10:01.080 --> 0:10:08.480 a better future. Today's episode is based on the article 0:10:08.640 --> 0:10:11.720 ten Hispanic scientists you should know on HowStuffWorks dot Com, 0:10:11.760 --> 0:10:14.439 written by Nicholas Garabus. The brain Stuff is production of 0:10:14.480 --> 0:10:17.439 iHeartRadio in partnership with the Hastuffworks dot Com and is produced 0:10:17.480 --> 0:10:20.440 by Tyler Klang four more podcasts from my heart Radio. 0:10:20.720 --> 0:10:23.920 Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen 0:10:23.960 --> 0:10:25.000 to your favorite shows.