Cuban physician Carlos Juan Finlay is recognized as a pioneer in yellow fever research.
Google doodle celebrates Cuban physician and scientist, Carlos Juan Finlay’s 180th birth anniversary. The noted scientists discovered that yellow fever spreads by mosquitoes. The Google doodle has Carlos Juan Finlay’s face amidst stagnant water, with leaves in it and mosquitoes breeding on them.
The scientist was born in 1833 in Puerto Príncipe, and studied at Jefferson medical college in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He went on to study in Havana and Paris and later started his medical practice in Cuba. In 1879 Finlay was appointed by the Cuban government to work in a North American commission to study causes of the yellow fever.
He presented his research to the fifth International Sanitary Conference in Washington DC where is stated that the carrier for yellow fever was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, now known as Aedes aegypti. Finlay’s hypothesis and exhaustive proofs were confirmed by US army doctor Walter Reed that led to the eradication of yellow fever. Finlay’s research saved thousands of lives throughout Africa, South America, the Caribbean and the southern US. He died in August 2015 at the age of 81 from a stroke caused by severe brain seizures in his home in Havana.
General Leonard Wood, a physician and military governor of Cuba, stated that: “The confirmation of Dr Finlay’s doctrine is the greatest step forward made in medical science since Jenner’s discovery of the vaccination.”
Google recently celebrated noted physicist CV Raman’s 125th birth anniversary with a doodle that displayed Raman effect with light rays emitting from a source. Raman received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the Raman effect”.
Source: The Guardian