<p>Hi, I have to write a short essay of no more than 250 words on this topic for a scholarship and I don’t have any idea what to write:</p>
<p>Indicate what, in your opinion, has been the most important advancement in medical history and why.</p>
<p>Can anyone give me some ideas?
Thank you</p>
<p>Unfortunately, they’re all going to be the same answer: the germ theory of disease. There’s just nothing that remotely compares. You could always break it down into subcategories – sanitation, penicillin, vaccines – but really, they’re all getting at the same thing.</p>
<p>This is going to be a very boring set of essays for the scholarship committee to read.</p>
<p>If you wanted to do something else – just for the sake of doing something else – you could talk about the future developments, things like pharmacogenomics and the mapping of the proteome and stuff like that. Advances in biologic agents like insulin and EPO. The reality is that those have either not yet happened or are very important but not as important as microbiology. The germ theory is really the most important one.</p>
<p>I think the vaccine concept was important.</p>
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<p>I doubt it. If we’re talking about high schoolers, you’ll probably see a lot of “penicillin” answers. </p>
<p>We were asked to brainstorm the greatest medical advances as our group project at my Northwestern interview. I said “germ theory” and the other two students interviewing with me didn’t even know what it was :(</p>
<p>Well, but penicillin (and antibiotics generally, and vaccines) are all part of that. It’s all anti-microbials.</p>
<p>The structure of DNA by Watson and Crick! Imagine where we would be without it? There would be no molecular biology…no depth to Biochemistry or Cell Biology, no microarray technology…no knowledge of genetic mapping or no understanding of polymorphisms, no understanding of mutations, nor Oncology.</p>
<p>Yeah, but choose between lacking those and lacking septic technique in surgery, not having any idea what causes things like pneumonia or consumption (TB), not having vaccines for measles, not having exterminated smallpox and (almost) polio…</p>
<p>Man, I’ll live in an microarray-free world any day if it means we’ve got ID under control.</p>
<p>Anesthesia, maybe?</p>
<p>Germ theory is important…but I’d argue if you wanted to discuss “medical” advances, I’d go with some thing that’s an application of that knowledge, being able to make an intervention. To me that’s the difference between bench science and medical science. Granted there’s a lot of cross over, but I think it’s okay to split hairs like that.</p>
<p>Hm. Not a bad point. So if everybody’s going to say penicillin, I guess the OP could go with another subset of microbiology. Vaccines, maybe, and the resulting ability to eliminate diseases like smallpox?</p>
<p>(At the same time, germ theory was applied pretty quickly, I think, when the pump handle in London was broken. It’s just such a classic story.)</p>