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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 by Tyler Klang four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 by Tyler Klang four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.