STARLET to SCIENTIST
Next time you’re in hospital having drugs administered via an intravenous (IV) drip, you may want to say a quiet thank you to Justine Johnstone Wanger.
Ninety years ago, Wanger and two colleagues published a ground-breaking paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) called “Influence of Velocity on the Response to Intravenous Injections”. It discussed how best to safely deliver drugs to treat diseases such as syphilis without inadvertently killing the patients.
The drug Salvarsan had been developed in Germany 20 years earlier and shown to be highly effective at combating venereal disease, which infected between 5-10% of the US population. However, there was a problem. Salvarsan contained arsenic and when delivered in high doses had the unfortunate side effect of poisoning the patient.
A bit of digging revealed she had no qualifications. She was officially a lab assistant – one with a very sharp brain.
For the best part of two decades, scientists had been trying to figure out how to use this and other drugs safely, without much luck. Then, at New York’s Columbia University, Wanger and fellow researchers Dr Sam Hirshfeld and Dr Harold Hyman
