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THE 1970s: MEDICINE AND HEALTH: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

On 21 September 1970 two physicians, Werner A. Bleyer and Robert T. Brekenridge, advised mothers to avoid taking aspirin in the latter stages of pregnancy to avoid developing bleeding problems in their babies.

Health, Education, and Welfare secretary Joseph A. Califano attacked the tobacco industry on 11 January 1978 with his statement that cigarette smoking is "slow-motion suicide." But President Jimmy Carter undercut Califano's anti-smoking campaign during his visit to North Carolina by pledging government support of efforts to make cigarettes "even safer than they are."

Dr. Morris E. Chafetz, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, reported on 18 February 1972 that alcoholism was the nation's greatest drug problem, with as many as nine million Americans affected.

On 23 July 1970 U.S. breakfast cereals came under fire from hunger consultant Robert Burnett Choate, Jr., who testified before a Senate committee that forty of the top sixty dry cereals had little nutritional content, with the worst advertised to children on television.

Full-scale testing of the swine flu vaccine to be used in the largest, most intensive U.S. immunization program began 21 April 1976, when Dr. Theodore Cooper, assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, administered the first shot to Dr. Harry M. Meyer, Jr., director of the Food and Drug Administration's Bureau of Biologics.

Raymond V. Damadian, a medical researcher from Brooklyn, New York, tested his first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner in 1977. His diagnostic tool came to be widely used to detect cancer and other abnormalities without exposing patients to X-ray radiation.

Brother physicians Herbert and Irving Dardik successfully used veins from umbilical cords as substitutes for clogged and dysfunctional arteries in the legs of adult patients on 18 September 1975.

On 24 March 1975 Dr. Isaac Djerassi, a Pennsylvania physician, reported the development of a drug therapy that could significantly improve the survival chances of children suffering from osteogenic sarcoma, a highly lethal bone cancer.

Dr. Eugene Gangerosa reported on 13 April 1975 that a simple oral treatment for dehydration could wipe out the mortality caused by cholera, infantile diarrhea, and other disorders.

In 1973 comedian Bob Hope was given a Citation to a Layman for Distinguished Service Award from the American Medical Association.

A test to determine sickle-cell anemia from sampling the amniotic fluid was developed on 4 November 1978 by Dr. Yuet Wai Kan, a professor of medicine at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.

Nobel Prize laureate Har Gobind Khorana and other Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers reported on 28 August 1976 that his team had provided a breakthrough in genetic engineering by successfully constructing a bacterial gene and implanting it in a living cell where it functioned normally.

Drs. Terry King and Noel Mills announced on 17 April 1975 the development of a new technique for closing a hole in the wall between the heart's upper chambers without the use of open-heart surgery

Drs. Harold Kolansky and William T. Moore, two psychoanalysts from Philadelphia, reported on 18 April 1971 that regular smoking of marijuana by "normal" youths could cause them to suffer serious psychological disturbances.

On 26 January 1976 Drs. Louis E. Kopolow and Frank M. Ochberg of the National Institute of Mental Health blamed the economic recession and accompanying inflation for a marked increase in admissions to mental health facilities.

On 29 March 1971 Dr. Saul Krugman, head of the New York University Medical Center research team, announced preliminary results in an experiment in immunization against serum hepatitis, a highly infectious and sometimes fatal liver disease.

In 1979 newspaper columnist Ann Landers was given a Citation to a Layman for Distinguished Service from the American Medical Association.

Dr. Timothy F. Leary, the controversial LSD researcher and promoter, was released on parole from San Diego's Metropolitan Correctional Center on 7 June 1976 after serving six years of his ten-year narcotic conviction.

On 24 March 1972 Dr. Arthur S. Leonard, head of the University of Minnesota's pediatric surgery division at the school of medicine, reported that he and his associates had developed a simple test that could detect the presence of neuroblastoma—a killer of young children—when it was at a stage curable by surgery.

Dr. Robert I. Levy of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health, reported on 23 February 1979 that the number of deaths caused by strokes and the incidence of new episodes of strokes had declined dramatically since 1972.

On 6 January 1971 Dr. Choh Hao Li, professor of biochemistry at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, synthesized the hormone responsible for growth in the human body. He was assisted by Donald H. Yamashiro, a research biochemist.

Saint Louis sex researchers Dr. William H. Masters, and Virginia E. Johnson on 23 April 1979 reported treating fifty-four homosexual men and thirteen lesbian women who wanted to function as heterosexuals, using a combination of sex therapy and psychotherapy. About 35 percent failed to achieve a long-standing reversal of their homosexuality. Masters and Johnson said their study convinced them that homosexuality is a form of "learned behavior" for most individuals, rather than a physical or emotional illness or a genetic disorder.

Dr. James S. McKenzie-Pollock, medical director of the American Social Health Association, on 13 July 1970 reported on a dramatic rise in infectious syphilis, reversing a ten-year trend of decline in the incidence of the disease.

On 10 June 1975, Drs. Thomas Milhorat and James McClenathan reported a new development in treating hydrocephalus, a brain disorder in children. Their new device shunted excess brain fluid to the heart and had a coil to lengthen the shunt as the child grew, thus reducing the necessity for dangerous repeated operations to replace shunts.

University of Louisville Medical School physician Dr. Condict Moore reported his finding on 25 October 1971 that smokers who continue to smoke after successful cancer treatment face a much greater risk of developing another malignancy than do smokers who stop after treatment for cancer.

Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, charged on 27 March 1974 that Americans were receiving harmful overdoses of radiation from diagnostic X rays.

Dr. Buford Nichols of the Baylor College of Medicine reported on 5 January 1979 that women who breast-feed their infants are less likely to develop breast cancer than those who do not.

Nevada governor Mike O'Callaghan signed a bill on 20 April 1973 that set up a system for state licensing of acupuncture.

On 18 November 1970 Dr. Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said that the common cold or flu could be warded off and treated with relatively large doses of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C.

Dr. Donald Pinkel, a leading leukemia researcher from Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, disclosed in a report of 26 April 1971 that certain combinations of drug and radiation therapy were making inroads against acute lymphocytic leukemia, a killer of more young American children than any other disease.

A research team in Texas including Drs. Elizabeth S. Priori, Leon Dmochowski, Brooks Meyers, and J. R. Wilbur announced on 2 July 1971 that it isolated a cancer virus from cells taken from a cancer patient. Specialists saw the development as a significant new lead in the search for human cancer viruses.

On 20 January 1973 Dr. David L. Rosenhan, a Stanford University psychologist, reported on a three-year experiment to determine whether personnel at mental hospitals could tell the sane from the insane. His conclusion was that they could not.

The longest-surviving recipient of a transplanted heart, Louis B. Russell, died at the age of forty-nine on 27 November 1974, after having received his new heart in 1968.

Two medical professors, Drs. Kenneth Ryan and John Morris, testified before a House Commerce subcommittee on 9 May 1977 that hysterectomies—many of them unnecessary—were performed more often than tonsillectomies.

Dr. Albert B. Sabin, developer of the polio vaccine bearing his name, told the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 24 April 1973 that common herpes viruses are factors in nine kinds of cancer. But Sabin said he had not learned what mechanism turns these common viruses into cancer-causing agents.

Stanford University cardiologist Dr. John Speer Schroeder reported on 6 May 1979 that 70 percent of heart transplant recipients lived at least a year after the operation, making the surgery an effective way to extend the lives of up to seventy-five thousand heart patients each year.

Haskell Shanks, age sixty-three, who was living with a mechanical heart pump affixed to his heart's aorta, died of unrelated kidney failure on 14 November 1971. The device had been implanted in Shanks's heart on 11 August. He lived longer with the pump than any other recipient of such a device.

On 3 December 1976 the discovery of the first biochemical test for chronic alcoholism was reported by Drs. Spencer Shaw, Charles S. Lieber, and Barry Stimmel of the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital.

U.S. surgeon general Jesse L. Steinfeld asserted on 10 January 1972 that persons who do not smoke cigarettes face some of the same health hazards of smoking that imperil smokers.

On 23 May 1974 the scientific review committee at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City concluded that Dr. William T. Summerlin deliberately falsified research involving skin grafting experiments with white mice.

On 1 June 1976 Dr. William Trager of Rockefeller University in New York City cultured the most lethal form of the malaria parasite, a key step toward development of a malaria vaccine.

In 1979 William C. Triplett and Richard B. A. Morrow patented a monitoring system that detects when a hospital patient is about to get out of bed or when he raises his head, thus alerting hospital staff to potential accidents.

A 1979 study coordinated by Harvard University psychologist Dr. George E. Vaillant indicated that men who are happy with their jobs, marriages, and leisure time enjoy longer, healthier lives.

On 3 May 1976 Dr. Andrew Weiland was one of a team of surgeons at Johns Hopkins that replaced a cancerous portion of a boy's thighbone with a part of his lower leg bone in order to reconstruct his leg.

On 10 August 1977 physicians Richard Whitley and Charles Alford of the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham conducted the first successful clinical trial of a drug, adenine arabinoside (ara-A), to treat a life-threatening viral infection—herpes encephalitis (a brain inflammation).

Dr. Roger J. Williams, a nutritionist and biochemist at the University of Texas, reported on 21 October 1970 that a series of his laboratory experiments had led him to believe that the ordinary white bread most Americans ate every day was "nutritionally far below" what it could be.

On 25 March 1974 Dr. Ernst L. Wynder said that a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet might protect against cancer of the colon and rectum, the second largest cause of cancer deaths in the United States.

Dr. InBae Yoon announced on 10 February 1975 a new surgical technique for female sterilization which could be performed in ten to fifteen minutes under a local anesthetic.