Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Vohllebaum. Here,
Speaker 1: it's Hispanic Heritage Month here in the United States, which
Speaker 1: is an excellent excuse to talk about some of the
Speaker 1: most world changing scientists who came from these Spanish speaking
Speaker 1: countries of the Americas. Though you don't have to twist
Speaker 1: our arms to talk about awesome scientists around here. First up,
Speaker 1: let's talk about Carlos Juan Finlay. Okay, before Google doodles,
Speaker 1: we honored important figures with postage stamps. Finlay, the physician
Speaker 1: who first linked yellow fever to Mosquitos in eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: has received both tributes. Given the innumerable lives he saved
Speaker 1: in the decades of scorn he endured for this radical link,
Speaker 1: we'd say he more than deserves them. Born in Cuba
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty three, Finlay studied abroad before returning to
Speaker 1: Havana as a general practitioner and optomologist with a penchant
Speaker 1: for scientifce research. At the time, yellow fever was ravaging
Speaker 1: the Tropics. This confounding infection caused a short flu like
Speaker 1: illness in most people who caught it, but in some
Speaker 1: just when their symptoms seemed to be improving, they'd be
Speaker 1: slammed with jaundiced yellow skin from liver damage. An internal
Speaker 1: bleeding would issue from the mouth, nose, and eyes. It
Speaker 1: terrorized populations and disrupted all walks of life, including in Havana.
Speaker 1: Finlay noticed that yellow fever epidemics roughly coincided with Havana's
Speaker 1: mosquito season, but his mosquito transmission hypothesis was met with
Speaker 1: disdain for decades until he convinced American military surgeon Walter
Speaker 1: Reed to look into it. Yes that Walter Reed, who
Speaker 1: the hospital was named for. Reed and his colleagues, who
Speaker 1: had been dispatched to Cuba to fight the disease that
Speaker 1: had killed so many soldiers during the Spanish American War,
Speaker 1: helped Finlay refine his experiments and verify that a mosquito
Speaker 1: was indeed the culprit. Yellow fever was wiped out of
Speaker 1: Cuba and Panama by controlling mosquito populations, enabling engineers to
Speaker 1: finally complete the Panama Canal. This work led eventually to
Speaker 1: the discovery of the pathogenic virus that mosquitoes transmit to
Speaker 1: cause yellow fever, and the development of a vaccine. Today,
Speaker 1: yellow fever is limited mostly to areas blocking access to vaccines.
Speaker 1: Our next researcher helped change our understanding of how the
Speaker 1: immune system works in the first place. Baru Bnasiroth was
Speaker 1: born in Caracas, Venezuela in nineteen twenty, lived in Paris
Speaker 1: as a youth, and spent most of his life and
Speaker 1: career in America. He became a naturalized citizen in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three after serving in the US Army wartime medical
Speaker 1: training program that drafted him out of medical school. He
Speaker 1: went on to become an immunologist who studied how our
Speaker 1: immune system knows not to attack our own cells under
Speaker 1: normal circumstances, and why it sometimes attacks transplanted organs and
Speaker 1: even our own cells in the case of autoimmune diseases
Speaker 1: like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Okay, the surfaces of
Speaker 1: our cells team with a unique array of antigens that
Speaker 1: identify those cells as ours and usually prevent our immune
Speaker 1: system from attacking those cells. Binaserroff determined the genetic basis
Speaker 1: of this, which won him the nineteen eighty Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: in Physiology or Medicine and advanced by Leaps and bounds
Speaker 1: are understanding of autoimmune diseases. He shared the Nobel with
Speaker 1: George D. Snell, who uncovered the initial evidence for this
Speaker 1: in mice back in the nineteen forties, and Jean Darcett,
Speaker 1: who was the first researcher to identify a human compatibility antigen. Next,
Speaker 1: let's talk about a researcher who looked into other cellular processes,
Speaker 1: those that fuel our bodies. As much as fad diets
Speaker 1: might tell us to cut out carbs, these energy packed
Speaker 1: molecules are essential to most life thanks to two opposing
Speaker 1: chemical processes, a combustion which allows us to break down
Speaker 1: carbohydrates and release energy needed to make our bodies work,
Speaker 1: and synthesis, which enables us to use various sugars to
Speaker 1: build other substances that we need to live. Before Argentine
Speaker 1: physician and biochemist Luis Federico Leloirre did his groundbreaking research
Speaker 1: into the transformation of one sugar into another, combustion was
Speaker 1: well understood, but synthesis remained a mysterious phenomenon. By isolating
Speaker 1: a new class of substances called sugar nucleotides, leloire found
Speaker 1: the key to deciphering this voluminous backlog of unsolved metabolic reactions.
Speaker 1: A new field of biochemistry opened up virtually over night,
Speaker 1: and Laloire received the nineteen seventy Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Speaker 1: for his work. He was born in Paris to Argentine
Speaker 1: parents in nineteen oh six, and the family moved to
Speaker 1: Buenos Aires when he was two years old, where he'd
Speaker 1: live in work for most of the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: After earning his medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires,
Speaker 1: he worked at the Institut due to Physiology, then established
Speaker 1: the Institute for Biochemical Research, which is where he began
Speaker 1: the research into milkshuters called lactose that would lead to
Speaker 1: his great breakthrough. But let's move out of the human
Speaker 1: body and into the wider world. A quick glance at
Speaker 1: Luis Alvarez's array of research and engineering projects reveals why
Speaker 1: colleagues described him as the prize wild idea man. Just
Speaker 1: a sample. He built US President Eisenhower an indoor golf
Speaker 1: training machine, analyzed the Zeppruder film, which is the color
Speaker 1: film that happened to capture John F. Kennedy's asassination, and
Speaker 1: tried to locate an Egyptian Pyramids treasure chamber using cosmic rays,
Speaker 1: but the large part of his career was spent studying
Speaker 1: subotomic particles in their behavior in situations like radioactive decay
Speaker 1: and interaction with magnetic fields. Born in nineteen eleven in
Speaker 1: San Francisco to Spanish American parents, he had already done
Speaker 1: pioneering work in subatomic particle by the beginning of World
Speaker 1: War II. During the war, he invented several radar applications
Speaker 1: and worked on the Manhattan Project. After that, he worked
Speaker 1: on the first proton linear accelerator and was awarded the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight Nobel Prize in Physics for his work
Speaker 1: with elementary particles. Physicists had already constructed cloud chambers and
Speaker 1: bubble chambers capable of spotting speedy charged particles via condensing
Speaker 1: vapor or boiling liquid, but tiny resonance particles, which exist
Speaker 1: for a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, were
Speaker 1: only detectable by the traces they left behind products of
Speaker 1: disintegration and collision reactions with other particles. Alvarez developed his
Speaker 1: own bubble chamber camera stabilizers and a computerized system for
Speaker 1: analyzing bubble photographs. Together with the linear accelerators that he
Speaker 1: helped invent. These revolutionized the discovery of elemental particles, which
Speaker 1: he and his team went on to discover by the
Speaker 1: tiny truckload. Next we have an environmental scientist, Mario J. Molina,
Speaker 1: born in nineteen forty three in Mexico. A little bit
Speaker 1: of background for this one. The end of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century was marked by the recognition that humans could significantly
Speaker 1: affect the environment, even the Earth itself. But as of
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies, beyond localized ecological concerns over things
Speaker 1: like factory pollution or the pesticide DDT and the vaguer
Speaker 1: terror of nuclear winter, we hadn't much considered the potentially
Speaker 1: global consequences of industry. This was especially true in the
Speaker 1: case of chlorofloracarbons or CFCs, which are a group of
Speaker 1: chemicals that are made up of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon
Speaker 1: that were found to be useful because they have various
Speaker 1: cool properties and are non toxic and non flammable, so
Speaker 1: they were going into everything from aerosol sprays to refrigerators.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen seventy four, scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario J.
Speaker 1: Molina argued that CFCs weren't as harmless as they seemed.
Speaker 1: Instead of washing out of the sky through rainfall or oxidation,
Speaker 1: they floated into the upper stratosphere, where ultraviolet waves from
Speaker 1: the sun broke them apart and set off an ozone
Speaker 1: destroying chemical reaction. In nineteen eighty five, the British Antarctica
Speaker 1: Survey detected a hole in the ozone layer, and we've
Speaker 1: been trying to prevent and correct the damage ever since,
Speaker 1: as the ozone is what keeps some of the dangerous
Speaker 1: radiation from the sun out. As a child in Mexico City,
Speaker 1: Molina admired his aunt, a chemist, and emulated her by
Speaker 1: converting a spare bathroom into a makeshift chemistry lab. He
Speaker 1: studied in Mexico and abroad, and made his groundbreaking discovery
Speaker 1: concerning CFCs during his post doctoral stint with Roland at
Speaker 1: University of California, Irvine. The work earned them in the
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and honor they
Speaker 1: shared with Paul J. Crutzen, a pioneer in studying the
Speaker 1: effects of nitrie oxide on ozone destruction. Our final entry
Speaker 1: today honors engineer Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina to become
Speaker 1: an astronaut. She was born in nineteen fifty eight in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, California, and earned her master's degree and doctorate
Speaker 1: in electrical engineering from Stanford University. As She went on
Speaker 1: to research information processing at Sandia National Laboratories and the
Speaker 1: NASA Ames Research Center, and she's listed as the co
Speaker 1: inventor on free patents in optics, object recognition, and image processing.
Speaker 1: Ochoa became an astronaut in nineteen ninety one and flew
Speaker 1: four Space Shuttle missions over the next eleven years, spending
Speaker 1: almost one thousand hours in orbit conducting research, including into
Speaker 1: damage to the ozone layer. In twenty thirteen, she was
Speaker 1: promoted to director of the Johnson Space Center, the first
Speaker 1: Hispanic person and second woman to achieve that honor. As
Speaker 1: she eventually retired from NASA to serve on several boards,
Speaker 1: both corporate and nonprofit, aimed at using science to create
Speaker 1: a better future. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: ten Hispanic scientists you should know on HowStuffWorks dot Com,
Speaker 1: written by Nicholas Garabus. The brain Stuff is production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio in partnership with the Hastuffworks dot Com and is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang four more podcasts from my heart Radio.
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