1941
A year when scientists quietly assembled the ingredients for both medicine's greatest triumph and its greatest terror.
Discoveries
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Synthesis of plutonium
Glenn T. Seaborg · Edwin McMillan · Joseph W. Kennedy · Arthur C. Wahl
On the nights of February 23 and 24, a team at Berkeley bombarded uranium with cyclotron deuterons and coaxed into existence element 94 — an atom that had never before existed on Earth in any appreciable quantity. The result was classified immediately, and the world would not learn what had been made until the war was over.
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Isolation of folic acid
Herschel K. Mitchell · Esmond E. Snell · Roger J. Williams
Researchers at the University of Texas extracted folic acid from spinach leaves, establishing the existence of a vitamin that cells require to divide properly. Its absence, it would later emerge, is behind a great deal of human suffering — which made finding it in a salad ingredient a quietly significant moment.
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Beadle and Tatum's work on genetic control
George Wells Beadle · Edward Lawrie Tatum
Working with the bread mould Neurospora, Beadle and Tatum demonstrated that specific genes encode specific enzymes — the one gene, one enzyme hypothesis. It was not a complicated idea, which was largely the point: the cell, it turned out, ran on something very like an instruction manual.
Milestones
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Penicillin mobilization for mass production begins
Howard Florey
Howard Florey crossed the Atlantic in June to persuade American pharmaceutical companies that a mould capable of killing bacteria deserved to be made by the ton. By October, the first formal meeting to plan industrial-scale production had convened — a conversation that would, within a few years, save more lives than any other in the history of medicine.
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