• Question: Who do you believe is the most influential scientist towards medical development? and if so why?

    Asked by Albie.S to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 13 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Matt Dunn

      Matt Dunn answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      It really depends how far back you want to go! In the modern day all kinds of people are contributing towards medical progress, but in the distant past some people really stand out as having moved the field forwards, such as Hippocrates, the father of medicine! He wrote many books about medicine and his work is still used today, in the form of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors swear.

    • Photo: Rob Brass

      Rob Brass answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      As Matt said lots of people have contributed, and continue to contribute, over thousands of years so it’s hard to pick out 1 person. A lot of time, maybe even all the time, one discovery cannot be made without the one before, we’re always building on the work of others!

      In my field of radiotherapy though I’d have to go for the obvious, Marie Curie. You probably know all about her, she’s the tough old Polish/French bird who did a lot of early work on radioactivity. However, a lot of the work she did was based on previous work by Henri Becquerel (the unit of radioactivity, Bq, is named after him) and Wilhelm Roentgen (he took the first medical x-ray image – of his wife’s hand!). Roentgen in particular is known as the father of modern radiology, but he accidentally discovered x-rays (only 2 weeks before he took the first image) while trying to build on work by Hertz, Tesla and others.

      Curie and Roentgen refused to patent their work as they wanted to share it with the world so that others could use it and build on it, that’s the spirit of science! 🙂

    • Photo: Kylie Belchamber

      Kylie Belchamber answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      i think Alexander Fleming was pretty awesome. He discovered penicillin, which is the first antibiotic. Before we had penicillin, people would die from simple infections, and operations were almost impossible. So I think his discovery changed the world for the better! This was also discovered around WW1 and 2, so saved thousands of lives of those hurt in the wars.

      He also discovered it by chance, by leaving a petri dish full of bacteria out on the side over night, and fining mould the next day which had killed some of the bacteria. What is awesome, is that instead of throwing it away like most people would have, he studied the mould and found how it worked!

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