In 1954, Tracy Hall and his team at General Electric achieved the first reproducible synthesis of diamonds, a process later refined with chemical vapor deposition to produce gem-quality lab diamonds and reduce demand for mined diamonds tied to conflict trade. In 1955, oncologist Jane Cook Wright, working at Bell Medical Center and Harlem Hospital, pioneered personalized cancer treatment by testing drugs on a patient's own tumor tissue in vitro before administering them, and developed multi-drug sequential combination chemotherapy to counter tumor resistance.
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Wright's in vitro tissue-testing approach aimed to prevent trial-and-error dosing directly on patients.
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Her sequential combination chemotherapy strategy involved switching drugs as tumors adapted to treatment.
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1:31:32>> 1954, first reproducible diamond synthesis, another concept we've touched on multiple times on the pod. >> Yes. So, fake diamonds, lab diamonds. The first one that was created was in 1954 by Tracy Hall and his team at General Electric. Um nowadays they use chemical vapor deposition to create gem quality diamonds. This has had a huge benefit to the global community especially to like you know places in Africa that had the blood diamond trade. Now I mean it's still there because people are crazy and still want diamonds that are out of the earth even though they're the same thing. But this has really like brought that trade down.
1:32:13It's a huge deal for industry as well. Uh yes, 1955 pioneering of personalized oncology and combination chemotherapy. Yes, this was onc oncologist Jane Cook Wright. She revolutionized cancer treatment at Bell Medical Center and Harlem Hospital. She pioneered this idea that we should take in vitro tissue of a of a tumor of a patient and then do tests on it with the drugs that we want to use in a petri dish to see if it works before we just do trial and error on the human being. Seems simple but it's a huge deal right for chemotherapy um to prevent tumor
1:32:55resistance. She also introduced this multi-drug sequential combination of chemotherapy where you like start with one then you go for the other because the tumor is going to adapt, right? She was able to figure all of that out. Um, an amazing black woman um on the board. >> This is 70 years ago. Crazy. 1955