Georgios Papanicolaou developed the vaginal smear technique at Cornell University Medical College in 1943, establishing the Pap smear as a non-invasive method for cancer screening. That same year, chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau designed the first commercial deep tank aerobic fermentation plant for Pfizer in Brooklyn, scaling penicillin production from small glass bottles to industrial tanks in time for World War II. In 1944, Robert Woodward and William Doering achieved the first total synthesis of quinine at Harvard, showing that a complex antimalarial drug could be made in the lab rather than extracted from plants.
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The hosts note Papanicolaou won a Nobel Prize for the technique that bears a shortened version of his name.
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Woodward and Doering's quinine synthesis is credited as opening the field of complex organic synthesis, letting chemists build such compounds without growing and extracting them from plants.
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The hosts mention 1965 as a related Nobel Prize in Chemistry date, though the transcript cuts off before explaining who it was awarded to.
263 words · auto-generated from the episode video
1:01:42Moving on to 1943, invention of the papsmear. Yeah, Georgios Papa Nicolo. He developed the vaginal smear technique at Cornell University Medical College in New York City. This established the papsmear. The pap comes from his last name. We're not going to call it Papa Nikolo smear. We call it the pap smear. Um won the Nobel Prize and it really established the modern foundation for non-invasive mass cancer screening. It's saved countless lives since 1943 >> to this day. Uh we're going to continue in 1943. The 40s were crazy with mass
1:02:22production of penicellin. >> Yes. This is chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rouso. She designed the first commercial deep tank aerobic fermentation plant for Fizer in Brooklyn, New York. And it scaled penicellin production from individual glass bottles to like now I've got a giant tank that I can make penicellin in. It transformed our World War II 1943 >> and and pharmaceuticals today can uh thank uh Margaret for that move similar to how Henry Ford did the mass production >> uh with the car. 1944 first total synthesis of quinine. Yes, this is
1:03:04Robert Woodward and William Doring. The first synthesis of a complex antimmalarial drug quinine at Harvard University. This is huge because before, you know, in order to make these kinds of organic materials, you got to find plants, you got to grow them, you got to extract them. Now we can make them in a laboratory. Organic synthesis is now on the board. >> Big deal. Very, very big deal. >> 1965 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.