This Month in Science and Medicine History – December 2024
by Leigh Ann Gardner (MSTP Senior Grants Manager)
December 1: Physician, politician, and anthropologist Te Rangi Hīroa or Te Rangihīroa (also known as Sir Peter Henry Buck) died in Honolulu, Hawaii on December 1, 1951. Born in c. 1877 in New Zealand with Māori descent on his maternal side of the family, he was raised in a Pākehā community with a love for his Māori and Pākehā ancestry. He attended medical school at the University of Otago, and he received his MD in 1910. He began his career as a public health officer among the Māori in New Zealand, working to improve sanitation in communities. In 1909, the member of Parliament in New Zealand representing the Māori died, and Hīroa was elected to replace him. He began to develop an interest in anthropology, and by the 1920s, he was doing field work to document the culture and music of Māori communities. He published and lectured on the material culture of the Māori during this time as well as continuing to work in public health. In 1926, he was invited to join the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Hawaii. For the remainder of his professional career, he focused on anthropology. He was a highly sought-after lecturer on Polynesian culture. Hīroa died of cancer in Hawaii in 1951. You can learn more about his life here. You can access his work on the settlement of Polynesia, The Vikings of the Sunrise, here.
December 10: Virologist Howard Temin, born on December 10, 1934, was one of the recipients of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his part in discovering the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of a cell. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in 1955, Temin entered a PhD program at the California Institute of Technology. After completing his PhD in 1959 and then undertaking a post-doc year at Cal Tech, Temin moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked as a virologist for the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. While there, he discovered that RNA could pass genetic information to DNA, which was contrary to the widely held assumption at the time that genetic information could only pass from DNA to RNA. However, by 1970, both Temin and David Baltimore, working independently, were able to confirm that genetic information could pass from RNA to DNA. Discovery of this, known as reverse transcriptase, is considered to be one of the most important discoveries of modern medicine. Temin used the fame of his Nobel Prize win to help others, such as when he helped Soviet scientists targeted by the KGB in 1978. Temin died in 1994, and you can learn more about his life here.
December 16: Microbiologist Bruce Ames, whose work focused on the mechanism of mutagenesis and DNA repair, was born on December 16, 1928, in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, and his PhD in 1953 from California Institute of Technology. Ames spent several years as an independent investigator at NIH before splitting a sabbatical year between the labs of Francis Crick and Jacob Monod. Ames returned to NIH as a section chief in 1962. His best-known accomplishment was the development of the Ames Test, which was an assay for easily and inexpensively evaluating the mutagenicity of compounds. This test is credited with revolutionizing the field of toxicology and has been used to identify several environmental and industrial carcinogens. During his career, he published more than 550 papers and studied the effect of diet on human health and aging, in addition to his work on carcinogens. Ames died in October 2024 at the age of 95, and you can learn more about him here and here.
December 27: On December 27, 1831, the HMS Beagle left England for a trip around the world. One of the passengers on this ship was a recently graduated naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin spent the next five years associated with this voyage, either spending his time on ship or exploring the continent and islands around South America. He later claimed this voyage was the most important of his life as it set the course of his career. By the end of the voyage, Darwin had gained a reputation in London as a naturalist, and he had also observed things that changed his views on the fixity of species. In 1839, Darwin contributed to The Voyage of the Beagle, a book which outlined the voyage and discoveries made. In the years following this pivotal voyage, Darwin continued his studies, eventually leading him to embrace a theory of natural selection, leading to his publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. You can learn more about the voyage of the HMS Beagle here or you can access the book The Voyage of the Beagle here.
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