For Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating the incredible achievements of women at @NIH. Here Dr. Nina Starr Braunwald checks in with a young patient. Dr. Braunwald was a pioneer in the field of cardiac surgery. One of the first women to train as a surgeon at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, she joined the National Heart Institute, now @NHLBI, in 1958. She made history in 1960, leading the first successful artificial human mitral valve replacement, using a design she created and fabricated. She developed many other valve designs, surgical treatments, and pioneering techniques during her time at NIH, leading the field of cardiac surgeryThis July marks the 200th Birthday of Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics. From 1856 to 1863, Mendel conducted experiments crossbreeding pea plants, illuminating the mechanisms of trait inheritance. Researchers at NIH have made their own historic genetic breakthroughs. Notably, Dr. Marshall Nirenberg’s translation of the genetic code in 1961 revealed the secrets of DNA and earned him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1989, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) was founded to support the international effort to identify, map, and sequence the entire human genome. Nirenberg honored the pioneering work of Gregor Mendel when he visited Mendel’s Square in the Czech Republic, pictured here.
