This Month in Science and Medicine History – May 2025
In May, we celebrate the contributions and achievements of Asian American and Pacific Islanders for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month as well as the contributions and achievements of Jewish Americans with Jewish American Heritage Month. Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month began as a 10-day celebration in 1977, and you can learn more about it here. Jewish American Heritage Month was first proclaimed in 2006, and you can learn more about it here.
Week 1 (First week of May): Taylor Gun-Jin Wang, a Chinese American scientist, became the first person of Chinese origin to go to space when he participated in the Challenger mission STS-51-B from April 29-May 6, 1985. Born in Shanghai in 1940, Wang studied physics at the UCLA, receiving his BS in 1967 and his PhD in low temperature physics in 1972. Following graduation, Wang joined the California Institute of Technology Jet propulsion laboratory, serving as a senior scientist and as a PI on several NASA experiments. In 1983, Wang was selected as the payload specialist for the Spacelab-3 mission. During his time in space, he was the principal designer of an experiment investigating the physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity. Wang has written more than 200 papers and holds approximately 30 US patents in several areas. He is the Centennial Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus at Vanderbilt University. You can learn more about him here and more about his space mission here.
Week 2 (May 5): The father of molecular microbial pathogenesis, Stanley Falkow, died on May 5, 2018. Born in 1934 to Jewish immigrant parents in a Yiddish speaking household, Falkow became entranced with microbes when he was 11, after reading Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif. He studied biology at the University of Maine, having picked the school due to their microbiology department. He graduated in 1955 and later entered a PhD program at Brown University, receiving his PhD in 1961. In his early research, he learned how to extract and isolate plasmids, and learned that they carried information from one microbe to another. His research also showed that harmless bacteria could serve as a source of resistance genes for pathogens, and he predicted the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria. Falkow also expanded on Robert Koch’s guidelines for defining when a microbe is responsible for an infection, and these were known as molecular Koch’s postulates. In addition to his scientific contributions, Falkow mentored more than 100 students over the course of his career and received numerous awards, including the Lasker Award for medical research and the National Medal of Science. You can learn more about his career here and here.
Week 3 (May 13): Dr. Dawon Kahng, a Korean American inventor and engineer who invented the first practical field-effect transistor, died on May 13, 1992. Born in what is now Seoul, Korea in 1931, he immigrated to the United States in 1955 and attended the Ohio State University, where he completed his doctorate in engineering in 1959. Working at Bell Laboratories following graduation, he and colleague Martin Atalla were the first to build a working field-effect transistor. Although neither Bell Laboratory nor the field embraced this invention at first, this transistor, known as MOSFET, is the basic component of most modern electronics. Working with colleague Simon Sze, in 1967 they invented the floating-gate MOSFET, which became the basis for flash memory technology. You can learn more about Kahng’s inventions here and here.
Week 4 (May 23): Dr. Irving Millman, co-inventor of the hepatitis B vaccine, was born on May 23, 1923, in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants. After serving in World War II in the US Army, he attended New York’s City College. After receiving his PhD from Northwestern University, he worked for several organizations, such as the Public Health Research Institute in New York and Merck and Company, before going to the Fox Chase Cancer Center to join Dr. Baruch Blumberg’s, a future Nobel Prize recipient, research group. While working with Blumberg, the men collaborated to create the hepatitis B vaccine. Millman was responsible for creating a way to separate the hepatitis B virus from a human blood sample, purify it, and then kill the pathogen. Blumberg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for this work. You can learn more about Millman here and here.
Week 5 (May 26): On May 26, 2018, Dr. Asha de Vos, a Sri Lankan marine biologist and pioneer of blue whale research, received a Golden Alumni award in Professional Achievement from the British Council Golden Alumni Awards, an award for alumni of UK universities. Dr. de Vos received her PhD from the University of Western Australia and was the first Sri Lankan to receive a PhD in marine mammalian research. In 2008, she founded the Sri Lankan Blue Whale Project, the first long-term study on blue whales in the northern Indian Ocean. As a result of her research, the International Whaling Commission has designated Sri Lankan blue whales as a species in urgent need of conservation research. She established Oceanswell, Sri Lanka’s first marine conservation research and education organization. You can learn more about de Vos’s work here and here.
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