History
Phenylketonuria (PKU) was one of the earliest recognized inborn errors of metabolism. In populations of European ancestry, it affects about 1 in 13,000 infants. In 1934, Følling discovered that restricting phenylalanine could improve the neurologic function of children with PKU, and within a few years it was established that a diet low in protein from infancy could prevent the mental retardation. Unfortunately, PKU was often not detected until significant brain damage had occurred. The ferric chloride test was unreliable in newborns and even by the 1950s there was no reliable, practical method for mass screening and detection of this disease before harm had occurred.
Robert Guthrie (1916–1995), a bacteriologist and physician at the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo, New York, reported in 1963 the initial version of this assay. Within a decade, newborn screening programs using this test were established in most of the United States and many other countries.
Read more about this topic: Guthrie Test
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)