Medicine
- July - The medical research group studying Minamata disease comes to the conclusion that mercury is the cause.
- Joseph Murray performs the world's first successful allotransplantation.
- Georges Mathé, a French oncologist, performs the first bone marrow transplant on five Yugoslavian nuclear workers whose own marrow has been damaged by intense irradiation caused by a criticality accident at the Vinča Nuclear Institute, but all of these transplants are rejected.
- First known case of human HIV, in the Belgian Congo.
Read more about this topic: 1959 In Science
Famous quotes containing the word medicine:
“I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.”
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (b. 1926)