Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Who discovered malaria?
A French Army physician Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered that malaria was caused by microscopic parasite (now called "Plasmodium falciparum") in 1880. But scientists were sceptical until Golgi intervened. It was Golgi who helped him prove that malarial parasite was a microscopic protozoan. From 1885, Golgi studied the malarial parasite and its transmission. He established two types of malaria, tertian and quartan fevers caused by "Plasmodium vivax" and "Plasmodium malariae" respectively. In 1886, he discovered that malarial fever (paroxysm) was produced by the asexual stage in the human blood (called erythocytic cycle, or Golgi cycle). In 1889-1890, Golgi and Ettore Marchiafava described the differences between benign tertian malaria and malignant tertian malaria (the latter caused by "P. falciparum"). By 1898, along with Giovanni Battista Grassi, Amico Bignami, Giuseppe Bastianelli, Angelo Celli and Marchiafava, he confirmed that malaria was transmitted by "Anopheline" mosquito.
Pathologist Alfred Whitmore and assistant Krishnaswami first reported the disease among beggars and morphine addicts at autopsy in Rangoon, present-day Myanmar, in a report published in 1912. They distinguished it from glanders, a disease of humans and animals that is similar in presentation, but caused by a different micro-organism. "B. pseudomallei", also known as the Whitmore bacillus, was identified in 1917 in Kuala Lumpur. Arthur Conan Doyle may have read the 1912 report before writing a short story that involved the fictitious tropical disease "tapanuli fever" in a Sherlock Holmes adventure.
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV. They shared the Prize with Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that human papilloma viruses can cause cervical cancer. Montagnier said he was "surprised" that Robert Gallo was not also recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo." According to Maria Masucci, a member of the Nobel Assembly, "there was no doubt as to who made the fundamental discoveries."
Plasmodium vivax is a protozoal parasite and a human pathogen. This parasite is the most frequent and widely distributed cause of recurring (Benign tertian) malaria, "P. vivax" is one of the five species of malaria parasites that commonly infect humans. Although it is less virulent than "Plasmodium falciparum", the deadliest of the five human malaria parasites, "P. vivax" malaria infections can lead to severe disease and death, often due to splenomegaly (a pathologically enlarged spleen). "P. vivax" is carried by the female "Anopheles" mosquito; the males do not bite.
Mosquito-borne diseases are currently most prevalent in East Africa, Latin America,  Southeast Asia, and India; however, emergence of vector-borne diseases in Europe have recently been observed. A weighted risk analysis demonstrated associations to climate for 49% of infectious diseases in Europe including all transmission routes. One statistical model predicts by 2030, the climate of southern Great Britain will be climatically-suitable for malaria transmission "Plasmodium vivax" malaria for 2 months of the year. By 2080 it is predicted that the same will be true for southern Scotland.
The Greek physician Hippocrates, the founder of scientific medicine, was the first to deal with the anatomy and the pathology of human spine. Galen developed an interest in anatomy from his studies of Herophilus and Erasistratus. The concept of studying disease through the methodical dissection and examination of diseased bodies, organs, and tissues may seem obvious today, but there are few if any recorded examples of true autopsies performed prior to the second millennium. Though the pathology of contagion was understood by Muslim physicians since the time of Avicenna (980–1037) who described it in "The Canon of Medicine" (c. 1020), the first physician known to have made postmortem dissections was the Arabian physician Avenzoar (1091–1161) who proved that the skin disease scabies was caused by a parasite, followed by Ibn al-Nafis (b. 1213) who used dissection to discover pulmonary circulation in 1242. In the 15th century, anatomic dissection was repeatedly used by the Italian physician Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502) to determine cause of death. Antonio Benivieni is also credited with having introduced necropsy to the medical field. Perhaps the most famous early gross pathologist was Giovanni Morgagni (1682-1771). His magnum opus, "De Sedibus et Causis Morborum per Anatomem Indagatis", published in 1761, describes the findings of over 600 partial and complete autopsies, organised anatomically and methodically correlated with the symptoms exhibited by the patients prior to their demise. Although the study of normal anatomy was already well advanced at this date, "De Sedibus" was one of the first treatises specifically devoted to the correlation of diseased anatomy with clinical illness. By the late 1800s, an exhaustive body of literature had been produced on the gross anatomical findings characteristic of known diseases. The extent of gross pathology research in this period can be epitomized by the work of the Viennese pathologist (originally from Hradec Kralove in the Czech Rep.) Carl Rokitansky (1804-1878), who is said to have performed 20,000 autopsies, and supervised an additional 60,000, in his lifetime.
The discovery of a role for the pancreas in diabetes is generally ascribed to Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski, who in 1889 found that dogs whose pancreas was removed developed all the signs and symptoms of diabetes and died shortly afterwards. In 1910, Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer suggested that people with diabetes were deficient in a single chemical that was normally produced by the pancreas—he proposed calling this substance insulin, from the Latin "insula", meaning island, in reference to the insulin-producing islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. The endocrine role of the pancreas in metabolism, and indeed the existence of insulin, was further clarified in 1921, when Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best repeated the work of Von Mering and Minkowski, and went further to demonstrate they could reverse induced diabetes in dogs by giving them an extract from the pancreatic islets of Langerhans of healthy dogs. The islets of Langerhans was discovered in 1869 by an anatomist named Paul Langerhans. He identified the keys cells in the pancreas which produce the main substance that controls glucose levels in the body.
Blood types were first discovered by an Austrian Physician Karl Landsteiner working at the Pathological-Anatomical Institute of the University of Vienna (now Medical University of Vienna). In 1900, he found that blood sera from different persons would clump together (agglutinate) when mixed in test tubes, and not only that some human blood also agglutinated with animal blood. He wrote a two-sentence footnote:
Major Alfred Whitmore (1876–1946) was an English pathologist who, together with C.S. Krishnaswami, identified "Burkholderia pseudomallei", the causative agent of melioidosis (also known as "Whitmore's disease") in opium addicts in Rangoon in 1911. He differentiated it from "Burkholderia mallei", the causative agent of glanders, by clinical and microbiological features.
The causative pathogen was first identified by Naosuke Hayashi in 1920. Confident that the organism was a protozoan, Hayashi concluded, stating, "I have reached the conclusion that the virus of the disease is the species of "Piroplasma" [protozoan] in question... I consider the organism in Tsutsugamushi disease as a hitherto undescribed species, and at the suggestion of Dr. Henry B. Ward designate it as "Theileria tsutsugamushi"." Discovering the similarities with the bacterium "Rickettsia prowazekii", Mataro Nagayo and colleagues gave a new classification with the name "Rickettsia orientalis" in 1930. ("R. prowazekii" is a causative bacterium of epidemic typhus first discovered by American physicians Howard Taylor Ricketts and Russell M. Wilder in 1910; and described by a Brazilian physician Henrique da Rocha Lima in 1916.)
Another group working contemporaneously with the Montagnier and Gallo groups was that of Dr. Jay Levy at the University of California, San Francisco. He independently discovered the AIDS virus in 1983 and named it the AIDS associated retrovirus (ARV). This virus was very different from the virus reported by the Montagnier and Gallo groups. The ARV strains indicated, for the first time, the heterogeneity of HIV isolates and several of these remain classic examples of the AIDS virus found in the United States.
Type 1 and type 2 diabetes were identified as separate conditions for the first time by the Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka in 400–500 AD with type 1 associated with youth and type 2 with being overweight. The term "mellitus" or "from honey" was added by the Briton John Rolle in the late 1700s to separate the condition from diabetes insipidus which is also associated with frequent urination. Effective treatment was not developed until the early part of the 20th century when the Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin in 1921 and 1922. This was followed by the development of the long acting NPH insulin in the 1940s.
It was not until French President François Mitterrand and American President Ronald Reagan met in person that the major issues were ironed out. The scientific protagonists finally agreed to share credit for the discovery of HIV, and in 1986, both the French and the US names (LAV and HTLV-III) were dropped in favor of the new term "human immunodeficiency virus" (virus de l'immunodéficience humaine, abbreviated HIV or VIH) (Coffin, 1986). They concluded that the origin of the HIV-1 Lai/IIIB isolate discovered by Gallo was the same as that discovered by Montagnier (but not known by Montagnier to cause AIDS). This compromise allowed Montagnier and Gallo to end their feud and collaborate with each other again, writing a chronology that appeared in "Nature" that year.
The genus "Neisseria" is named after the German bacteriologist Albert Neisser, who in 1879 discovered its first example, "Neisseria gonorrheae", the pathogen which causes the human disease gonorrhea. Neisser also codiscovered the pathogen that causes leprosy, "Mycobacterium leprae". These discoveries were made possible by the development of new staining techniques which he helped to develop.
Diabetes was one of the first diseases described, with an Egyptian manuscript from 1500 BCE mentioning "too great emptying of the urine". The Ebers papyrus includes a recommendation for a drink to be taken in such cases. The first described cases are believed to be of type 1 diabetes. Indian physicians around the same time identified the disease and classified it as "madhumeha" or "honey urine", noting the urine would attract ants.
Alexander Fleming had first discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, but at that time believed it had little application. When Florey and his team recognised the potential of the discovery for combating bacterial infection, they faced the problem of how to manufacture penicillin in sufficient quantities to be of use. Heatley, although the junior member of the team, possessed a natural gift for ingenuity and invention. It was he who suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity, thus purifying the penicillin.
The first publicized discovery of a partial fossil mosasaur skull in 1764 by quarry workers in a subterranean gallery of a limestone quarry in Mount Saint Peter, near the Dutch city of Maastricht, preceded any major dinosaur fossil discoveries, but remained little known. However, a second find of a partial skull drew the Age of Enlightenment's attention to the existence of fossilized animals that were different from any known living creatures. When the specimen was discovered between 1770 and 1774, Johann Leonard Hoffmann, a surgeon and fossil collector, corresponded about it with the most influential scientists of his day, making the fossil famous. The original owner, though, was Godding, a canon of Maastricht cathedral.
Europe knew of Madagascar through Arab sources; based on them "The Travels of Marco Polo" claimed that "the inhabitants are Saracens, or followers of the law of Mohammed", without mentioning other inhabitants. Other than its size and location, everything about the island in the book describes southeastern Africa, not Madagascar. European contact began on 10 August 1500, when the Portuguese sea captain Diogo Dias sighted the island after his ship separated from a fleet going to India. The Portuguese continued trading with the islanders and named the island "São Lourenço" (Saint Lawrence). In 1666, François Caron, the director general of the newly formed French East India Company, sailed to Madagascar. The company failed to establish a colony on Madagascar but established ports on the nearby islands of Bourbon (now Réunion) and Isle de France (now Mauritius). In the late 17th century, the French established trading posts along the east coast. On Île Sainte-Marie, a small island off the northeastern coast of Madagascar, Captain Misson and his pirate crew allegedly founded the famous pirate utopia of Libertatia in the late 17th century. From about 1774 to 1824, Madagascar was a favorite haunt for pirates. Many European sailors were shipwrecked on the coasts of the island, among them Robert Drury, whose journal is one of the few written depictions of life in southern Madagascar during the 18th century. Sailors sometimes called Madagascar "Island of the Moon".
It was in the late 1600s that plant anatomy became refined into a modern science. Italian doctor and microscopist, Marcello Malpighi, was one of the two founders of plant anatomy. In 1671 he published his "Anatomia Plantarum", the first major advance in plant physiogamy since Aristotle. The other founder was the British doctor Nehemiah Grew. He published "An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants" in 1672 and "The Anatomy of Plants" in 1682. Grew is credited with the recognition of plant cells, although he called them 'vesicles' and 'bladders'. He correctly identified and described the sexual organs of plants (flowers) and their parts.
The second half of the 20th century was the golden age of virus discovery and most of the over 2,000 recognised species of animal, plant, and bacterial viruses were discovered during these years. In 1957, equine arterivirus and the cause of Bovine virus diarrhoea (a pestivirus) were discovered. In 1963, the hepatitis B virus was discovered by Baruch Blumberg, and in 1965, Howard Temin described the first retrovirus. Reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that retroviruses use to make DNA copies of their RNA, was first described in 1970, independently by Howard Martin Temin and David Baltimore. In 1983 Luc Montagnier's team at the Pasteur Institute in France, first isolated the retrovirus now called HIV. In 1989 Michael Houghton's team at Chiron Corporation discovered Hepatitis C.
For decades biologists had been at work on the medicine that became penicillin. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named the new substance "penicillin". His publications were largely ignored at first, but it became a significant antibiotic in the 1930s. In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, used penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful. Moving on to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, but failed to cure a fifth.
In 1880, while working in the military hospital in Constantine, Algeria, he discovered that the cause of malaria is a protozoan, after observing the parasites in a blood smear taken from a patient who had just died of malaria. He found the causative organism to be a protozoan which he named "Oscillaria malariae", but later renamed "Plasmodium". This was the first time that protozoans were shown to be a cause of disease of any kind. The discovery was therefore a validation of the germ theory of diseases.
On 9 July 1898 Ross wrote Manson:
Ross' scientific evidences were soon fortified by Italian biologists including Giovanni Battista Grassi, Amico Bignami, and Giuseppe Bastianelli, who discovered that human malarial parasite was transmitted by the actual biting (disproving one of Manson's hypotheses) of female mosquito. In 1899 they reported the infection of "Plasmodium falciparum" with the mosquito "Anopheles claviger" However the practical importance of validating the theory, i.e. control of mosquito vector should be an effective management strategy for malaria, was not realised by the medical community and the public. Hence in 1900 Patrick Manson clinically demonstrated that the bite of infected anopheline mosquitoes invariably resulted in malaria. He acquired carefully reared infected mosquitoes from Bignami and Bastianelli in Rome. His volunteer at the London School of Tropical Medicine, P. Thurburn Manson gave a detailed account of his malarial fevers and treatment after bitten by the mosquitoes. As he summarised, Manson's clinical trial showed that the practical solution to malaria infection was in:
Danilewsky was the first to describe the bird malaria. He discovered the symptoms of malaria in birds such as acute anaemia, enlargement of liver and spleen, accumulation of pigments in the blood cells. He also gave the first clue to the similarity of malaria of birds to that of humans. (This idea was followed by Ronald Ross in 1898 who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for experimentally demonstrating the principle.) He identified the bird malaria parasites as "pseudovacules", and by 1885 he recognised for the first the existence of three separate genera of protozoan parasites in birds, now known as "Plasmodium", "Haemoproteus" and "Leucocytozoon". However his publication was in Russian and therefore was not accessible to outside Russia, until they were translated into French in a three-volume book "La Parasitologie Comparée du Sang" in 1889.
Grassi made his first contribution on malaria in 1890, when he (with Raimondo Feletti) discovered "Haemamoeba vivax", later renamed "Plasmodium vivax". He described "Proteosoma praecox", the malaria parasite of birds. In 1891 he performed the first inoculation of malaria parasites from one bird into another. He was the first to compile a comprehensive monograph on the identity and impact of different malarial parasites. His work "Studi di uno Zoologo Sulla Malaria " in 1891 is as relevant today as it was in his time. His description of the specific characteristics responsible for benign tertian ("Haemamoeba vivax"), malignant tertian ("Laverania malariae", renamed "P. falciparum") and quartan ("Haemamoeba malariae", renamed "P. malariae") malaria resolved the confusion of the time. In addition, his monograph also presented the first conclusive depiction that the bite of only female "Anopheles" mosquitoes could transmit malaria. In a classic experiment, he dispatched 112 volunteers to the Capaccio plains, a malaria-endemic area, protected them from mosquito bites between dusk and dawn, and they did not get malaria (except five of them) compared with 415 unprotected volunteers who all contracted malaria. In 1898 he and Bignami were able to produce the final proof of mosquito transmission of malaria when they fed local mosquitoes ("A. claviger") on infected patients and found that uninfected individuals developed malaria through the mosquito bite.