People in the News

People in the News

On 16 April 1990 Marissa Eve Ayala was born, having been conceived by her parents to serve as a bone marrow donor for their daughter, Anissa, eighteen, who was suffering from myelogenous leukemia.

On 16 December 1991 David Baltimore, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist (1975), resigned from the presidency of the Rockefeller University after being charged with falsifying research data. The charges were upheld by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigation. In 1996 a federal appeals panel over-turned the charge and a year later he was appointed president of the California Institute of Technology.

On 13 July 1998 the remains of First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie, shot down in Vietnam (11 May 1972), were positively identified through DNA testing. His remains had been interned at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C., for fourteen years.

On 19 August 1996 Grady Carter, a former smoker and survivor of lung cancer, was awarded $750,000 in a liability suit against the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company.

On 30 September 1991 Dr. Frances Conley rescinded her resignation as professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. She had announced her resignation in May to protest alleged sexual harassment and the promotion of a male colleague but decided to stay after the university acted on her complaints.

On 8 October 1999 Catherine D. De Angelis, vice dean of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, was named editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the first woman to hold that position.

On 17 September 1999 Jesse Gelsinger, an eighteen-year-old Arizona man who was suffering from ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency, became the first person to die after receiving gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania.

On 14 November 1991 basketball great Earvin "Magic" Johnson announced he is HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) positive and retired.

On 2 March 1992 Virginia Eshelman Johnson and William Howell Master, sexologists who cowrote Human Sexual Response (1966), were divorced after twenty-one years of marriage.

On 13 June 1996 U.S. political asylum was granted to Fauziya Kasinga, a nineteen-year-old woman who fled Togo to avoid genital mutilation (female "circumcision").

In 1993 Ira C. Magaziner served as an adviser on health-care reform to the committee chaired by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. His complicated and unwieldy solutions were incorporated in a lenghty report that was panned by conservatives and professional health-care providers.

In 1994 Maclyn McCarty received a Special Recognition Award in Medical Science for his seminal and historic investigation in the 1940s and 1950s that revealed that DNA is the chemical substance of heredity and for ushering in a new era of contemporary genetics.

On 19 November 1997 Bobbi McCaughey gave birth to seven children, the first live birth of living septuplets, in Carlisle, Iowa.

In April 1995 pioneering transplant surgeon Dr. John Najarian, of the Minnesota Anti-Lymphocyte Globulin (MALG) Program at the LTniversity of Minnesota, was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for embezzlement, income tax evasion, and conspiring to deceive the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), He had been forced out as department chairman in 1993.

On 11 August 1997 Amoret Powell was charged with murder because her heroin-laced breast milk allegedly led to the death by oxygen deprivation of her seven-week-old daughter, Eve, in Tucson, Arizona.

On 10 November 1996 Cheyenne Pyle, a newborn, became the youngest heart-transplant recipient in the nation, undergoing the operation ninety minutes after her birth at the University of Miami-Jackson Children's Hospital. Despite the procedure, she died on 16 November.

On 13 February 1998 David Satcher became Surgeon General after being head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The position had been empty for three years.

On 19 August 1991 Arlette Schweitzer, forty-two, of South Dakota, announced her surrogate pregnancy with her own grandchildren, in order to help her daughter, who had no uterus.

On 25 January 1999 Matthew Scott underwent the first hand transplant in the United States, in Louisville, Kentucky.

On 19 January 1993 Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the first African American to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), completed four years in that position and returned to the Presidency of More-house College.

On 4 July 1990 Christian Scientists David R. and Ginger Twitchell were convicted of involuntary man-slaughter in Boston, Massachusetts. They believed prayer would cure their infant son, Robyn, who died of a bowel obstruction on 8 April 1986. The ruling was later overturned on a technicality by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.