My Science School

Virginia Apgar was an American physician, who developed the Apgar Score System, a method employed in hospitals around the world to quickly evaluate the well-being of newborns. Apgar scoring has helped decrease infant mortality to a great degree. Virginia Apgar was born as the third child and raised in Westfield, New Jersey. Her older brother died early from tuberculosis, and her younger brother had a chronic illness. This perhaps strengthened her determination to become a doctor. She graduated with a degree in zoology in 1929 from Mount Holyoke College. Along with studies, she learnt violin, played sports, acted in plays and wrote for newspapers. Apgar graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1929 and from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933. She joined as the anaesthesiologist at Bellevue Hospital, New York City, in 1935. Anaesthesiologists are doctors who specialise in giving patients anaesthesia, a medicine which controls pain during surgery. In 1937, she became the first female board-certified anaesthesiologist.

Apgar also became the first woman to head a specialty division at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

She was appointed a director of obstetric anaesthesia, and researched the effects of maternal anaesthesia on newborns and how to lower neonatal mortality rates. In 1952, she formulated the Apgar Score as a way to assess how well a baby has endured delivery. It was published in 1953, and today is still administered worldwide.

What's Apgar score?

Apgar score is administered within the first few minutes of a baby being born. The baby is quickly assessed and scored against five simple criteria namely Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration (backronym of APGAR). A score above 7 is normal, from 4 to 6 is considered fairly low and a score below 3 may indicate that the newborn needs medical attention. Teratology Apgar was also a name to reckon with in the teratology (a study of birth abnormalities) field of medicine.

She joined the National Foundation-March of Dimes in 1959, where she remained employed until her death in 1974. In 1972, Apgar co-authored a book called 'Is My Baby All Right?' with Joan Beck. It explains the causes and treatments of a range of birth defects.

Virginia Apgar was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995.

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In 1907, Rutherford took the chair of physics at the University of Manchester. There, he discovered the nuclear nature of atoms and was the world's first successful "alchemist": he converted nitrogen into oxygen. In 1919, he succeeded Sir Joseph Thomson as Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He also became Chairman of the Advisory Council, H.M., Government, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research; Professor of Natural Philosophy, Royal Institution, London; and Director of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, Cambridge.

Under Rutherford's directorship, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James Chadwick for discovering the neutron, Cockcroft and Walton for splitting the atom using a particle accelerator and Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. His research was instrumental in the convening of the Manhattan Project.

By 1911, after studying the deflection of alpha particles shot through gold foil, he had established the nuclear theory of the atom. In June of 1919, Rutherford announced his success in artificially disintegrating nitrogen into hydrogen and oxygen by alpha particle bombardment. Rutherford then spent several years directing the development of proton accelerators (atom smashers).

Knighted in 1914, Rutherford was raised to the peerage as the first Baron Rutherford of Nelson in 1931-a barony that ceased to exist after his death. He died at Cambridge on October 19, 1937, and was buried at Westminster Abbey, in London.

Credit : Atomic Archive 

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In recognition of the increasing importance of science, the University of Cambridge had recently changed its rules to allow graduates of other institutions to earn a Cambridge degree after two years of study and completion of an acceptable research project. Rutherford became the school’s first research student. Besides showing that an oscillatory discharge would magnetize iron, which happened already to be known, Rutherford determined that a magnetized needle lost some of its magnetization in a magnetic field produced by an alternating current. This made the needle a detector of electromagnetic waves, a phenomenon that had only recently been discovered. In 1864 the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had predicted the existence of such waves, and between 1885 and 1889 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz had detected them in experiments in his laboratory. Rutherford’s apparatus for detecting electromagnetic waves, or radio waves, was simpler and had commercial potential. He spent the next year in the Cavendish Laboratory increasing the range and sensitivity of his device, which could receive signals from half a mile away. However, Rutherford lacked the intercontinental vision and entrepreneurial skills of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who invented the wireless telegraph in 1896.

X-rays were discovered in Germany by physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen only a few months after Rutherford arrived at the Cavendish. For their ability to take silhouette photographs of the bones in a living hand, X-rays were fascinating to scientists and laypeople alike. In particular, scientists wished to learn their properties and what they were. Rutherford could not decline the honour of Thomson’s invitation to collaborate on an investigation of the way in which X-rays changed the conductivity of gases. This yielded a classic paper on ionization—the breaking of atoms or molecules into positive and negative parts (ions)—and the charged particles’ attraction to electrodes of the opposite polarity.

Thomson then studied the charge-to-mass ratio of the most common ion, which later was called the electron, while Rutherford pursued other radiations that produced ions. Rutherford first looked at ultraviolet radiation and then at radiation emitted by uranium. (Uranium radiation was first detected in 1896 by the French physicist Henri Becquerel.) Placement of uranium near thin foils revealed to Rutherford that the radiation was more complex than previously thought: one type was easily absorbed or blocked by a very thin foil, but another type often penetrated the same thin foils. He named these radiation types alpha and beta, respectively, for simplicity. (It was later determined that the alpha particle is the same as the nucleus of an ordinary helium atom—consisting of two protons and two neutrons—and the beta particle is the same as an electron or its positive version, a positron.) For the next several years these radiations were of primary interest; later the radioactive elements, or radioelements, which were emitting radiation, enjoyed most of the scientific attention.

Credit :  Britannica 

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Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist, who postulated the nuclear structure of the atom, which led to the exploration of nuclear physics. He discovered alpha and beta rays, and proposed the laws of radioactive decay. He is often called the father of nuclear physics".

Ernest Rutherford was born in 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand. Ernest received a double major in Mathematics and Physical Science from Canterbury College, the University of New Zealand, Wellington in 1893. He was awarded an Exhibition Science Scholarship, enabling him to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, the U.K., as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under JJ Thomson, who was an expert on electromagnetic radiation. In 1895, Rutherford developed a simple apparatus to detect electromagnetic waves, or radio waves.

Early breakthrough

Along with Thomson, he studied the effects of X-rays on the conductivity of gases, resulting in a paper about atoms and molecules dividing into ions. The work led to the discovery of the electron by Thomson. Rutherford, meanwhile, went on to study the radioactivity of uranium. In 1898, he left for Canada to become the Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill University, Montreal, and continued his research there. The same year, he discovered that there are two distinct types of radiation and he named them "alpha" and "beta". He also described some of their properties. It was later determined that the alpha particle is the same as the nucleus of helium atom consisting of two protons and two neutrons and the beta particle is the same as an electron or positron. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for this discovery.

Other scientific contributions

Rutherford discovered that thorium gave off an emanation that was radioactive. Rutherford came up with the concept of radioactive half-life-he found that a sample of a radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay. The half-life is unique for each radioelement and thus serves as an identifying tag.

In 1907, Rutherford took the chair of Physics at the University of Manchester. There, he became an "alchemist" of sorts when he successfully converted nitrogen into oxygen by bombarding nitrogen gas with alpha particles.

Throughout his career, Rutherford worked with leading scientists. He was knighted in 1914 and was buried in Westminster Abbey after his death in 1937.

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