QUIET CONTRIBUTORS
History may be written by the victors, but it’s high time some of history’s quieter contributors got the attention they deserve. From medical breakthroughs to fearless adventurers, this group of historical heavyweights all deserve to be household names.
Henrietta Lacks // Immortal Cells
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, but parts of her live on to this day. Since the time they were taken from her (without her knowledge) during a medical examination at Johns Hopkins, cells collected from her cervix tissue have remained alive—and thriving.
Lacks was one of many Black people whose bodies contributed to nonconsensual medical experiments at Johns Hopkins and beyond in the mid-20th century. Cells collected from others had died, but the ones lifted from Lacks’s tissue under the legitimizing sheen of medical treatment proved, shockingly, to divide again and again. The immortal “HeLa cells” have gone on to provide the foundation for two Nobel Prizes, nearly 20,000 patents, and countless medical advances. But it wasn’t until 20 years after Lacks’s death that anyone—including her family—knew they’d belonged to her.
Virginia Apgar // Better Health for Newborns
Despite graduating fourth in her class at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933, Virginia Apgar faced a host of setbacks in the early decades of her career. She initially worked in surgery, though was discouraged from continuing by the chair. Later, when she returned to Columbia as director of anesthesia in 1938, she had to contend with lower pay and her colleagues’ lack of respect for the then-undervalued field.
By the mid-1940s, however, things began to look up. Anesthesia became better respected, helping propel Apgar to the position of professor at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons—the first woman to have the job. The work Apgar is best remembered for came in the 1950s when she developed a system for assessing the health of newborns. The Apgar Score is still used to this day.
Rosalind Franklin // The Third Contributor to the Double Helix
When most people think of DNA, they think of two pairs—the double-helix and Watson and Crick. James Watson and James Crick revolutionized the scientific world when they published their model of DNA. And while the two were duly lauded, few knew that there had been a third (and unwitting) contributor: Rosalind Franklin.
Franklin, as it happened, had also been working to uncover the structure of DNA, and had a now-famous photograph among her research. When an estranged work partner showed Franklin’s unpublished research to Watson and Crick, they ultimately built their final model in part off of her findings. For years afterward, Franklin’s critical contributions were all but erased.
Bayard Rustin // Civil Rights Leader
Long before the Civil Rights movement began gaining steam in the late 1950s, Bayard Rustin had already gained the attention of federal authorities over his demands for equality. As early as the 1930s, he was protesting the racial segregation in the U.S. military and traveled the country making speeches. In 1963, Rustin and A. Philip Randolph teamed up with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to plan the March on Washington.
Alexander Fleming // Discovery of Penicillin
While serving in the Army Medical Corps during World War I, Scottish physician and scientist Alexander Fleming watched as soldiers died as a result of infected wounds. His observations led him to write an article on the topic that went unaccepted in the journals of the day.
In 1928, he inadvertently discovered a bacteria-killing mold after leaving a Petri dish uncovered near an open window. After determining it was part of the Penicillium genus, he published a 1929 paper about the discovery he’d since named penicillin. Initially largely ignored, penicillin caught the attention of two scientists in 1940, who began mass-producing it during the Second World War. “I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that,” Fleming later said. “I only discovered it by accident.”
Mildred and Richard Loving // Fighters for Interracial Love
Mildred and Richard Loving’s 1958 marriage was entirely normal, except for the fact that it happened to be illegal in Virginia, their home state. The problem? Richard was white, and Mildred was Black and Native American, which violated the states’ so-called Racial Integrity Act. After being arrested just five weeks into their marriage, the couple was told they could either go to prison or stay out of the state for the next 25 years.
But the couple wanted to live at home, so after trying to create a new life in Washington, D.C., they contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and sued the state. After multiple appeals, the case landed in the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1967, the justices announced a unanimous decision that made the Virginia law (and with it, laws on the books in 15 other states) unconstitutional.