The 1970s Medicine and Health: Headline Makers

Kenneth C. Edelin (1937–) Kenneth C. Edelin, chief resident in obstetrics at Boston City Hospital, was found guilty of manslaughter on February 15, 1975, and sentenced to one year's probation. Prosecutors had accused him of killing a male fetus after he had performed a legal abortion at the hospital on October 3, 1973. The seventeen-year-old mother had been in her twentieth to twenty-second week of pregnancy. Prosecutors had argued that the fetus had been old enough to be considered a living being; Edelin's lawyers had argued otherwise. On December 17, 1976, the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned Edelin's conviction.

James F. Fixx (1932–1984) James F. Fixx was an overweight magazine editor who started running in 1969 to improve his conditioning. That decision changed not only his life but also the lives of many others. In 1977, he published The Complete Book of Running. The best-selling book helped spur Americans to pursue running as a means to better health. By the end of the 1970s, one hundred thousand people were finishing marathons each year. An estimated nine million Americans ran at least one hundred days a year.

Donald A. Henderson (1928–) Donald A. Henderson, director of the World Health Organization's program to eradicate smallpox, accepted the Albert Lasker Public Service Award in 1976 on behalf of the organization. Under Henderson's direction, massive vaccination programs had been initiated around the world to rid the planet of this dreaded disease. In late 1979, smallpox was officially certified as eradicated. The virus, however, is not extinct: Samples of the organism continue to survive in two laboratories in the United States and Russia.

Rosalyn S. Yalow (1921–) Rosalyn S. Yalow became the second woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine when she was given the award in 1977. A medical physicist, Yalow was honored for developing, in collaboration with her associate Soloman A. Berson, the laboratory procedure called radio immunoassay (RIA). Scientists use RIA to measure the concentration of hundreds of chemical and biological substances in the blood and other fluids of the human body. Yalow had invented the technique in 1959 initially to measure the amount of insulin in the blood of adult diabetics.