This Month in Science and Medicine History – June 2025
by Leigh Ann Gardner (MSTP Senior Grants Manager)
June 1: Born on June 1, 1951, in Couva, Trinidad & Tobago, Dr. Lall Ramnath Sawh is a noted urologist and performed the first kidney transplant in the Caribbean from a live donor to the recipient. Although Sawh spent his childhood helping his parents sell items in the local market, his excellent academic record allowed him to attend Naparima College, one of Trinidad’s best secondary schools. He went on to attend medical school at the University of the West Indies and then specialized in urology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Following his studies, Sawh returned home to Trinidad and practiced as a urologist. He introduced “buttonhole surgery” and kidney transplants to his country and also introduced the lithotripter to kidney stone treatment in 1996. He has also used surgical methods for male impotence and openly discussed issues related to male impotency. You can learn more about Sawh here.
June 9: Computer scientist Lynn Conway, considered a pioneer in microelectronic chip design, died on June 9, 2024. Born Robert Sanders, she initially attended MIT, however, she later dropped out and enrolled at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering. She was hired by IBM but fired when she began her gender transition in the late 1960s, and she was one of the first Americans to undergo modern gender transition. In the 1970s, she collaborated with Carver Mead to develop a simpler, more scalable way to design microchips. Their work became known as the Mead-Conway revolution in Very Large Scale Integration (VSLI). Conway’s work also advanced the framework to advance electronic design automation. She is credited with developing algorithms to arrange millions (and billions) of transistors on a microchip. She was quiet about her contributions to science for many years, but began speaking out in 2000, telling her story and what she endured. In her later life she became an outspoken advocate for transgender scientists. You can learn more about her life here.
June 15: The first successful operation in the United States to remove gallstones from a patient was performed on June 15, 1867, by Dr. John Stough Bobbs, in Indianapolis, Indiana. The patient, a young woman in her early 30s, had a mass in her abdomen. While others suspected an ovarian cyst, Dr. Bobbs was not sure, but he had no other diagnosis. As there was no surgical hospital in Indianapolis at that time, the procedure was performed in a 3rd floor room over a drugstore. During the surgery, he discovered the patient had a mass, which when cut, contained several small bodies, which Bobbs removed. After removing the stones, he realized that it was the gallbladder, which he did not remove, as he didn’t believe he should remove it. The patient made a full recovery, outliving Dr. Bobbs as well as most of the eight witnesses to the procedure. The first removal of a gallbladder did not occur until 1882. You can learn more about this first procedure here.
June 23: British epidemiologist Alice Stewart, whose research showed the effect of radiation on human health, died on June 23, 2002. Born in 1906 to two physicians, she was encouraged to pursue education, and attended medical school at Girton College, Cambridge University. Following her training, she worked at a hospital in London and later ran an emergency medical clinic at St. Albans. She then moved to Oxford, where she researched the effects of exposure to TNT in munitions workers. In 1955, she worked on the Oxford Childhood Cancer Survey, which, when published in 1956, created an uproar. The case-controlled study showed the association between children with leukemia and fetal exposure to diagnostic x-rays; although some in the medical community did not believe the results of the study, later studies largely corroborated her work. Following her retirement, Stewart was invited to study medical records of nuclear workers at the Hanford plutonium production plant, and her research found these workers had a much higher incidence of radiation-induced ill health than official reports showed. Although there were questions about her methodology, she spent the last decades of her life testifying on behalf of nuclear workers seeking compensation and American and British veterans of atomic testing. You can learn more about her life and work here and here.