Tag Archives: history of medicine

GenBank has reached 200 billion base pairs from > 350,000 spp.

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“Almost the number of stars in the Milky Way.” Through this stellar comparison, the National Institutes of Health proudly announced in 2005 that the content of their computerized collection of DNA sequences called GenBank had reached 50 billion bases or units of DNA. Today, it contains far more, over 200 billion bases from over 350,000 different species, making it one of the largest scientific database in the world.

Here is the announcement of the availability of the Nirenberg papers: “GenBank & The Early Years of “Big Data”

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2016/03/03/genbank-the-early-years-of-big-data/

“Deciphering the Genetic Code: A 50 Year Anniversary” January, 2015

Marshall Nirenberg in the lab in early 1960’s, when he completed the first summary document of the genetic code — how triplets (DNA sequences) direct amino acids to form proteins.  Pictures of the group and more about the papers are here:

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2015/01/21/deciphering-the-genetic-code-a-50-year-anniversary/

A young man in a lab coat and plastic gloves holds up a glass tube in a laboratory.

PubMed Central: Visualizing a Historical Treasure Trove

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Posted by on February 23, 2016 in Collections, News | 2 Comments

By Tyler Nix, Kathryn Funk, Jeffrey S. Reznick, and Erin Zellers

“A wealth of medical history awaits your exploration in the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) free and full-text digital archive of journals PubMed Central (PMC)! Known to most of its users as a free, full-text archive of recent biomedical journals, PMC also reaches back in time over two centuries.

An account of centralized health and relief agencies in Massachusetts during the 1918 influenza pandemic; an article by Florence Nightingale on nursing reform; a paper by W. H. R. Rivers on his treatment of “war neuroses” during World War I; a medical case report on America’s 20th president James A. Garfield, following his assassination in 1881; post-World War II thoughts about the future of the Army Medical Library by its director Frank Rogers; and seminal historical research articles aplenty: by Sir Alexander Fleming, on the use of penicillin to fight bacterial infections; by Walter Reed, on the transmission of yellow fever by mosquitoes; and by the bacteriologist Ida A. Bengtson, the first woman to work in the Hygienic Laboratory of the U.S. Public Health Service, the forerunner of the National Institutes of Health.”

Photos, and the article continues here:

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2016/02/23/pubmed-central-visualizing-a-historical-treasure-trove/  from 1809+

From NLM Office Of Communications <NLM_OfficeOfCommunications@public.govdelivery.com> 2/23/16