How Have Hispanic Scientists Changed the World?

From particle physics to immunology to the ozone layer, these six scientists from the Spanish-speaking Americas redefined their disciplines with their work. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/10-hispanic-scientists.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Vohllebaum. Here,
it's Hispanic Heritage Month here in the United States, which
is an excellent excuse to talk about some of the
most world changing scientists who came from these Spanish speaking
countries of the Americas. Though you don't have to twist

(00:22):
our arms to talk about awesome scientists around here. First up,
let's talk about Carlos Juan Finlay. Okay, before Google doodles,
we honored important figures with postage stamps. Finlay, the physician
who first linked yellow fever to Mosquitos in eighteen eighty one,
has received both tributes. Given the innumerable lives he saved

(00:45):
in the decades of scorn he endured for this radical link,
we'd say he more than deserves them. Born in Cuba
in eighteen thirty three, Finlay studied abroad before returning to
Havana as a general practitioner and optomologist with a penchant
for scientifce research. At the time, yellow fever was ravaging
the Tropics. This confounding infection caused a short flu like

(01:08):
illness in most people who caught it, but in some
just when their symptoms seemed to be improving, they'd be
slammed with jaundiced yellow skin from liver damage. An internal
bleeding would issue from the mouth, nose, and eyes. It
terrorized populations and disrupted all walks of life, including in Havana.

(01:28):
Finlay noticed that yellow fever epidemics roughly coincided with Havana's
mosquito season, but his mosquito transmission hypothesis was met with
disdain for decades until he convinced American military surgeon Walter
Reed to look into it. Yes that Walter Reed, who
the hospital was named for. Reed and his colleagues, who

(01:48):
had been dispatched to Cuba to fight the disease that
had killed so many soldiers during the Spanish American War,
helped Finlay refine his experiments and verify that a mosquito
was indeed the culprit. Yellow fever was wiped out of
Cuba and Panama by controlling mosquito populations, enabling engineers to
finally complete the Panama Canal. This work led eventually to

(02:11):
the discovery of the pathogenic virus that mosquitoes transmit to
cause yellow fever, and the development of a vaccine. Today,
yellow fever is limited mostly to areas blocking access to vaccines.
Our next researcher helped change our understanding of how the
immune system works in the first place. Baru Bnasiroth was

(02:32):
born in Caracas, Venezuela in nineteen twenty, lived in Paris
as a youth, and spent most of his life and
career in America. He became a naturalized citizen in nineteen
forty three after serving in the US Army wartime medical
training program that drafted him out of medical school. He
went on to become an immunologist who studied how our
immune system knows not to attack our own cells under

(02:54):
normal circumstances, and why it sometimes attacks transplanted organs and
even our own cells in the case of autoimmune diseases
like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Okay, the surfaces of
our cells team with a unique array of antigens that
identify those cells as ours and usually prevent our immune

(03:15):
system from attacking those cells. Binaserroff determined the genetic basis
of this, which won him the nineteen eighty Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine and advanced by Leaps and bounds
are understanding of autoimmune diseases. He shared the Nobel with
George D. Snell, who uncovered the initial evidence for this
in mice back in the nineteen forties, and Jean Darcett,

(03:36):
who was the first researcher to identify a human compatibility antigen. Next,
let's talk about a researcher who looked into other cellular processes,
those that fuel our bodies. As much as fad diets
might tell us to cut out carbs, these energy packed
molecules are essential to most life thanks to two opposing

(03:57):
chemical processes, a combustion which allows us to break down
carbohydrates and release energy needed to make our bodies work,
and synthesis, which enables us to use various sugars to
build other substances that we need to live. Before Argentine
physician and biochemist Luis Federico Leloirre did his groundbreaking research

(04:17):
into the transformation of one sugar into another, combustion was
well understood, but synthesis remained a mysterious phenomenon. By isolating
a new class of substances called sugar nucleotides, leloire found
the key to deciphering this voluminous backlog of unsolved metabolic reactions.
A new field of biochemistry opened up virtually over night,

(04:40):
and Laloire received the nineteen seventy Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for his work. He was born in Paris to Argentine
parents in nineteen oh six, and the family moved to
Buenos Aires when he was two years old, where he'd
live in work for most of the rest of his life.
After earning his medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires,
he worked at the Institut due to Physiology, then established

(05:02):
the Institute for Biochemical Research, which is where he began
the research into milkshuters called lactose that would lead to
his great breakthrough. But let's move out of the human
body and into the wider world. A quick glance at
Luis Alvarez's array of research and engineering projects reveals why
colleagues described him as the prize wild idea man. Just

(05:26):
a sample. He built US President Eisenhower an indoor golf
training machine, analyzed the Zeppruder film, which is the color
film that happened to capture John F. Kennedy's asassination, and
tried to locate an Egyptian Pyramids treasure chamber using cosmic rays,
but the large part of his career was spent studying
subotomic particles in their behavior in situations like radioactive decay

(05:50):
and interaction with magnetic fields. Born in nineteen eleven in
San Francisco to Spanish American parents, he had already done
pioneering work in subatomic particle by the beginning of World
War II. During the war, he invented several radar applications
and worked on the Manhattan Project. After that, he worked
on the first proton linear accelerator and was awarded the

(06:12):
nineteen sixty eight Nobel Prize in Physics for his work
with elementary particles. Physicists had already constructed cloud chambers and
bubble chambers capable of spotting speedy charged particles via condensing
vapor or boiling liquid, but tiny resonance particles, which exist
for a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, were

(06:33):
only detectable by the traces they left behind products of
disintegration and collision reactions with other particles. Alvarez developed his
own bubble chamber camera stabilizers and a computerized system for
analyzing bubble photographs. Together with the linear accelerators that he
helped invent. These revolutionized the discovery of elemental particles, which

(06:56):
he and his team went on to discover by the
tiny truckload. Next we have an environmental scientist, Mario J. Molina,
born in nineteen forty three in Mexico. A little bit
of background for this one. The end of the twentieth
century was marked by the recognition that humans could significantly
affect the environment, even the Earth itself. But as of

(07:19):
the early nineteen seventies, beyond localized ecological concerns over things
like factory pollution or the pesticide DDT and the vaguer
terror of nuclear winter, we hadn't much considered the potentially
global consequences of industry. This was especially true in the
case of chlorofloracarbons or CFCs, which are a group of

(07:41):
chemicals that are made up of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon
that were found to be useful because they have various
cool properties and are non toxic and non flammable, so
they were going into everything from aerosol sprays to refrigerators.
But in nineteen seventy four, scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario J.
Molina argued that CFCs weren't as harmless as they seemed.

(08:06):
Instead of washing out of the sky through rainfall or oxidation,
they floated into the upper stratosphere, where ultraviolet waves from
the sun broke them apart and set off an ozone
destroying chemical reaction. In nineteen eighty five, the British Antarctica
Survey detected a hole in the ozone layer, and we've
been trying to prevent and correct the damage ever since,

(08:27):
as the ozone is what keeps some of the dangerous
radiation from the sun out. As a child in Mexico City,
Molina admired his aunt, a chemist, and emulated her by
converting a spare bathroom into a makeshift chemistry lab. He
studied in Mexico and abroad, and made his groundbreaking discovery
concerning CFCs during his post doctoral stint with Roland at

(08:49):
University of California, Irvine. The work earned them in the
nineteen ninety five Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and honor they
shared with Paul J. Crutzen, a pioneer in studying the
effects of nitrie oxide on ozone destruction. Our final entry
today honors engineer Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina to become
an astronaut. She was born in nineteen fifty eight in

(09:12):
Los Angeles, California, and earned her master's degree and doctorate
in electrical engineering from Stanford University. As She went on
to research information processing at Sandia National Laboratories and the
NASA Ames Research Center, and she's listed as the co
inventor on free patents in optics, object recognition, and image processing.
Ochoa became an astronaut in nineteen ninety one and flew

(09:35):
four Space Shuttle missions over the next eleven years, spending
almost one thousand hours in orbit conducting research, including into
damage to the ozone layer. In twenty thirteen, she was
promoted to director of the Johnson Space Center, the first
Hispanic person and second woman to achieve that honor. As
she eventually retired from NASA to serve on several boards,

(09:57):
both corporate and nonprofit, aimed at using science to create
a better future. Today's episode is based on the article
ten Hispanic scientists you should know on HowStuffWorks dot Com,
written by Nicholas Garabus. The brain Stuff is production of
iHeartRadio in partnership with the Hastuffworks dot Com and is produced

(10:17):
by Tyler Klang four more podcasts from my heart Radio.
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