|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Keith Black
Pioneering Neurosurgeon
I went into an accelerated program, out of high school, at the University of Michigan, where they took 50 students, and we were admitted to both the medical school and undergrad out of high school, and you got your M.D. degree in six years, in addition to your undergrad degree. In the first year there I had an opportunity to take a course in neuroanatomy, and I knew right away. As soon as I looked and started studying the anatomy of the human brain, I realized how incredibly fascinating the human brain is, and that that's what I wanted to study. That's what I wanted to do.
View Interview with Keith Black
View Biography of Keith Black
View Profile of Keith Black
View Photo Gallery of Keith Black
|
|
|
Keith Black
Pioneering Neurosurgeon
I was working in the lab of a heart surgeon who had developed his own artificial heart valve, and I had a concept that the heart valve might be damaging red blood cells, so I asked to do a research project using a scanning electron microscope at the time. When I was trying to basically learn the technique, I took some blood from the heart-lung bypass machine from patients undergoing heart-lung bypass, and when I incubated the red blood cells overnight, I noticed that a certain percentage of these cells change from their normal discoid shape to one that resembled a porcupine, called an econocyte. What I did was to describe the discocyte-econocyte transformation in patients undergoing heart-lung bypass, as an index of sub-lethal red blood cell damage. The importance being that the blood cells could not parachute through the small capillaries. Normally a capillary is about five microns and the blood cell is seven, and it has to parachute through. The econocytes get stuck and can cause blockage in those capillaries.
View Interview with Keith Black
View Biography of Keith Black
View Profile of Keith Black
View Photo Gallery of Keith Black
|
|
|
Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Elizabeth Blackburn: I was trained with somebody called Fred Sanger, who won a Nobel Prize, first for sequencing proteins, and he was working on the sequencing of nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, but then DNA when I was a Ph.D. student with him. And so there was very few ways of sequencing DNA then, and one of the things you could do was sequence DNA at the very ends of the long DNA molecules that make up genomes, and so I saw that there would be a feasibility, a way of looking at the ends of DNA, whereas perhaps in those days you couldn't look at the middle of DNA so well. And I went to Joe Gall's lab, and was interested in pursuing this, and Joe Gall, who I mentioned before was a really good mentor, is also an extremely good biologist in recognizing there are good biological systems for asking certain questions. And he was the one who said, "There is this system that has very small short chromosomes," and lots of them, meaning lots of ends, so that this would be something that -- you know, this would be a system. And I was excited because I wanted to look at the ends of things, the ends of DNA, which nobody really had been able to look at in eukaryotes, organisms like us that had nuclei in their cells. And so it was partly that it was doable, and partly because there was a good system to do it in.
View Interview with Elizabeth Blackburn
View Biography of Elizabeth Blackburn
View Profile of Elizabeth Blackburn
View Photo Gallery of Elizabeth Blackburn
|
|
|
Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
Norman Borlaug: Well, in my mind, I always said, why is it that -- by then we'd done testing with the old Minnesota, Montana and Canadian spring wheats -- Why is it that those things you can't bring down? Because we had the yield test with them included, comparing to the new ones. You can't bring them where the day length is 38 degrees or less, because they're the lowest yielding wheats when that happens, and yet here are the crosses that came from this. I had been forced by rust to make a second group to avoid a rust epidemic in Mexico. The first ones were Yaqui times -- or I should say Marquis times -- Newthatch from Minnesota. The second one was Mentana, an Italian wheat crossed to Kenya that had rust resistance. And combining those, this new rust didn't cause us any trouble.
View Interview with Norman Borlaug
View Biography of Norman Borlaug
View Profile of Norman Borlaug
View Photo Gallery of Norman Borlaug
|
|
|
Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
Norman Borlaug: At that time the criticism of Pakistan and India, especially, they said, "With this mound of people, there's no hope. They've got to die off to a fraction of the population of today." And I had seen enough on these tests that my trainees had run in many countries. Do not accept that. But there's behind the scene, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, both of them together had decided that the breakthrough in production should come in India. The need was the greatest and it was to be built on not wheat, but on sorghum and millet and cassava. But then the Mexican wheats got into the picture and screwed all of that up.
View Interview with Norman Borlaug
View Biography of Norman Borlaug
View Profile of Norman Borlaug
View Photo Gallery of Norman Borlaug
|
|
|
Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
I say that the only way that the world can keep up with food production to the levels that are needed with a growing world population, is by the improvement of science and technology, and with the right policies that permit the application of that science and technology. And that includes availability of the improved seeds, fertilizer -- how much of each kind of nutrient -- and the control of weeds, which is very important, and then, finally, this whole question of credit and policy on pricing. All of those have to be part of the package.
View Interview with Norman Borlaug
View Biography of Norman Borlaug
View Profile of Norman Borlaug
View Photo Gallery of Norman Borlaug
|
| |
|
