These people are superheroes, plain and simple. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the top 10 times in history when one person was responsible (either directly or indirectly) for saving millions of other lives.
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00:00And then I made my decision. I would not trust the computer.
00:04I picked up the telephone handset, spoke to my superiors, and reported that the alarm was false.
00:11Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the top 10 times in history
00:16when one person was responsible, either directly or indirectly, for saving millions of other lives.
00:22The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable.
00:28Good. Let me try, and we'll know for sure, won't we?
00:36Can you quickly tell us how you came up with this maneuver to save someone from choking?
00:42The frightening truth is that there are countless ways that a person could suddenly die within seconds.
00:47But we have the American surgeon Dr. Henry Heimlich to thank for providing a universally used solution for one of them, choking.
00:55The Heimlich maneuver is a first aid technique used to save choking victims.
00:59Developed in the 1970s by Dr. Heimlich, it works by applying pressure to the diaphragm,
01:04which then dislodges food or other objects that are blocking a person's airway.
01:08So the simple solution was how do you always drive the object away from the lung and toward the mouth?
01:14And as a chest surgeon, I knew if you pushed up on the diaphragm and compressed the lungs,
01:18it would act like a bellows and blow the object out.
01:21Today, it is a fundamental and essential skill taught in CPR courses,
01:26and it's a technique that everyone is recommended to know.
01:29Ultimately, it's impossible to place a number on how many lives the Heimlich maneuver has saved in the 50 plus years it's been in use,
01:37but it can be applied at any moment and all around the world to prevent disaster.
01:41Grasp that fist with your other hand and pull back and up quickly until the object is expelled
01:49or the person loses consciousness and needs to be lowered to the ground to begin CPR.
01:53Number nine, the petite curies in World War One, Marie Curie.
01:58To help the war effort, Marie taught herself to drive
02:02and took the so-called petite curies to wherever they were needed,
02:06where she'd unload the equipment, hook up the generator,
02:10and activate the x-ray machine with little or no protection from the rays for herself.
02:16At the outbreak of World War One in 1914, Marie Curie was already a world-renowned trailblazer of science.
02:23Her work on radioactivity led to the first of two Nobel Prizes in 1903,
02:28with the second coming in 1911 for her discovery of polonium and radium.
02:32But even after all of that, she by no means rested.
02:36Fearful of a German invasion of Paris, many fled the capital.
02:40Marie, however, stayed.
02:42During the war, Curie set up a fleet of mobile x-ray units.
02:46They became known as petite curies,
02:48and they were continuously sent into the heart of the battle wherever wounded soldiers needed aid.
02:54Curie recruited her own daughter to help with the effort
02:57and is said to have hurriedly learned how to drive a car purely so that she could help with the war effort.
03:02Again, we simply cannot calculate precisely how many lives were saved thanks to Curie's efforts,
03:08but her mobile units were vital to those on the front.
03:11Years later, Curie contracted a fatal blood disease,
03:14caused in part by exposure to radiation during her service.
03:19But her work lives on, sparking innovation in science, education, and medicine to this day.
03:33...was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his work toward easing the world's hunger problem.
03:39Known as the father of the Green Revolution,
03:42Norman Borlaug was an agronomist, an expert in soil and crops,
03:46whose large-scale work on improving yields totally transformed agriculture in the 20th century.
03:51His most famous and impactful contributions were in the growing of wheat.
03:55Starting in Mexico in the mid-1940s, Borlaug worked both in a team and individually
04:01to develop variously hearty and high-yield varieties of the staple crop,
04:05at a time when Mexico had been notably struggling to produce enough for demand.
04:09He partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation and was transferred to the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement,
04:14or CIMMYT to use the Spanish acronym.
04:18After more than a decade working on the venture, Borlaug then took his findings worldwide,
04:23and especially into South Asia.
04:25There, his super crop sparked another sea change in the farming industry,
04:29again dramatically improving the yield.
04:31There's no telling just how important Borlaug's work was,
04:35but some calculate that it could be responsible for saving not just millions,
04:39but billions of people worldwide.
04:41It's really impossible to understand the massive growth of the human population,
04:48to understand the urbanization of our species,
04:52to understand our tremendous increasing ecological impact on the world.
05:00Unless we understand Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution.
05:07The genesis of modern-day vaccines began in 1796,
05:11when an English doctor took on smallpox.
05:14In history, there have been many crucial developments of vital vaccines.
05:18It was Britain's Edward Jenner who created the world's first of any type for smallpox in 1796.
05:24Meanwhile, and in modern times,
05:26there was the American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman,
05:29who delivered more than 40 vaccines,
05:31including one of the most widely administered for MMR.
05:34Jonas Salk was another hugely influential figure in the mid-20th century though.
05:39An American virologist,
05:40he developed one of history's most important medicines,
05:43the polio vaccine.
05:45Since the turn of the 20th century,
05:47polio, also known as infantile paralysis,
05:51had become an increasingly menacing fact of American life.
05:55Before Salk, polio had been a devastating disease that caused paralysis and death,
06:00and primarily affected children.
06:02Salk reportedly worked flat out for years to develop a treatment, however,
06:06and in 1955, the polio shot was released.
06:10Within 25 years, the disease had been eliminated from America.
06:14Today, the miracle jab has ridden almost all of the rest of the world of it as well.
06:19It became more and more evident that we were really in trouble.
06:24And without knowing what to do,
06:27or how to stop it,
06:29or how to get away from it,
06:31we were just stuck with it.
06:36I'm designing a machine that will allow us to break every message,
06:41every day,
06:43instantly.
06:43In times of war, there are some who truly step up.
06:47Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist,
06:50but he also goes down as one of the most important figures of World War II
06:54thanks to his code-breaking work against Nazi Germany.
06:57At Britain's Bletchley Park,
06:58Turing led a team that successfully cracked Germany's infamous Enigma code.
07:03In short, Turing's genius meant that the Allied forces were able to intercept
07:07and understand thousands of German messages every single day,
07:12during the height of the conflict.
07:13The standard Enigma machine had over 150 million, million, million,
07:20possible daily settings.
07:21There is no one exact moment when Enigma was broken,
07:25but Turing led a series of urgent breakthroughs
07:27that ultimately enabled Britain to monitor communications
07:30that had once been indecipherable.
07:32It was a crucial win for Allied intelligence,
07:35and is said to have significantly shortened the duration of the war,
07:38thereby, again, potentially saving untold millions of lives.
07:43Stalingrad,
07:45the Ardennes,
07:47the invasion of Normandy,
07:50four victories that would not have been possible
07:52without the intelligence that we supplied.
07:54Number 5.
07:55The discovery of Artemisinin,
07:56Tu Yo-Yo.
07:57The malaria parasite and the mosquito that transmits it
08:01have probably affected human history
08:03more than any other creatures we share the planet with.
08:05Malaria is easily one of the most damaging and deadly diseases in human history.
08:10Estimates vary, but at their highest,
08:12it's predicted that it may even have been responsible
08:15for up to half of all human deaths ever.
08:18Therefore,
08:19anyone who contributes to the fight against it
08:21has the potential to save a lot of people.
08:23It was the Chinese pharmaceutical chemist Tu Yo-Yo
08:26who perhaps made the greatest breakthrough of all, though.
08:29In the late 1960s,
08:31she worked as a lead scientist on Project 523,
08:34a Chinese effort to develop antimalarial drugs
08:37in response to rising malaria deaths in the Vietnam War.
08:40Tu Yo-Yo,
08:41whose research primarily drew upon traditional Chinese medicine,
08:44soon discovered Artemisinin in 1972,
08:47a drug group that's now used worldwide as a first-line treatment for malaria.
08:52Her findings were initially published anonymously,
08:55but in 2015,
08:56she got the credit she deserved when she won the Nobel Prize,
09:00then aged 84.
09:12A captain in the Army Medical Corps during World War I,
09:15Fleming had watched many of his fellow soldiers die,
09:19not from wounds they suffered in battle,
09:20but from infections they came after.
09:23And it was these needless deaths that spurred his research.
09:26Some people work for years specifically to change the world.
09:30Others manage to do it by accident.
09:32The latter happened to Alexander Fleming,
09:34a Scottish biologist who, in 1928,
09:37by chance discovered penicillin,
09:39the world's first antibiotic,
09:41while studying bacteria growth at St. Mary's Hospital in London.
09:45So the story goes,
09:46Fleming had accidentally left the lid off a Petri dish before going on holiday.
09:50And when he returned,
09:51he discovered that that dish was now hosting a new kind of mold,
09:55penicillin,
09:56which had killed the bacteria that should have been there.
10:06His observation that the mold inhibited bacterial growth
10:09led to the development of antibiotics,
10:11and to one of the most profound and seismic revolutions in medical history.
10:16Countless infections that were once life-threatening now weren't.
10:19Untold lives that may have once been lost could now be saved.
10:34Number 3.
10:35Stopping Nuclear War
10:37Stanislav Petrov.
10:42The sirens sounded very loudly,
10:44and I just sat there for a few seconds,
10:47staring at the screen with the word
10:49LAUNCH
10:50displayed in bold red letters.
10:52In 1983,
10:53Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant colonel,
10:56operating amidst the Cold War.
10:58On September 26th of that year,
11:00he also saved the world.
11:02On that day,
11:03Petrov correctly identified incoming nuclear missile alerts as being false alarms.
11:08To all appearances,
11:09the data said that a multi-missile attack had been launched against the Soviet Union by the United States,
11:15a move that should have resulted in a Soviet counter,
11:17and nuclear war within minutes.
11:19Rather than immediately launching retaliatory strikes, however,
11:23Petrov's calm judgment and instinct urged him to think twice.
11:40And he was right to hesitate.
11:42The US hadn't launched an attack,
11:44the USSR was not under threat,
11:46and nuclear war didn't need to begin.
11:48Nevertheless, it very nearly did begin,
11:51were it not for Petrov,
11:52whose actions effectively saved the millions of lives that would have been lost.
12:07Number 2.
12:08Number 2.
12:09Solving the Cuban Missile Crisis.
12:11Vasily Akhipov.
12:3121 years prior to when Stanislav Petrov averted nuclear disaster,
12:35something similar had played out in the waters around Cuba.
12:38The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962
12:40goes down as arguably the closest humankind has ever come to nuclear war.
12:44The purpose of these bases can be none other
12:48than to provide a nuclear strike capability
12:51against the Western Hemisphere.
12:53However, when the infamous standoff was at its most tense,
12:56the actions of one Soviet naval officer may have single-handedly prevented the worst from happening.
13:02Vasily Akhipov was serving aboard the B-59 submarine at the time,
13:06where he was one of three high-ranking officials
13:08who had to all agree in order for a nuclear weapon to be launched.
13:11When among all the geopolitical turmoil of the time,
13:15the other two officials voted yes to launch an attack against the US,
13:18Akhipov was the only dissenting voice.
13:21As such, nothing was launched,
13:23their submarine surfaced,
13:24and the watching world avoided a nuclear catastrophe.
13:27Although, it wasn't until years later that just how close we came was fully revealed.
13:33I think it is perhaps a mistake to think of this as a crisis.
13:36This is not a simple world we live in any longer.
13:39When you have a world polarized into two camps,
13:42they do not work on simply one front.
13:44Before we unveil our top pick,
13:46here are some honorable mentions.
13:48Karl Landsteiner.
13:50He was the first to identify and classify blood into the groups A, B, and O,
13:54which quickly led to the first successful blood transfusions in the early 1900s.
13:59Today, around 107 million units of blood donations are collected globally every year,
14:06demonstrating the huge impact of Landsteiner's discovery.
14:09James Harrison.
14:10Known as the man with the golden arm,
14:12Harrison gave 1,173 blood plasma donations over more than 60 years,
14:18and his rare blood type has saved millions of babies.
14:22Gertrude Ellion.
14:23Her breakthrough research led to the creation of azidothymidine or AZT,
14:28the first widely used drug against HIV-AIDS.
14:31Recipient of numerous awards including the Nobel Prize for Medicine
14:35in recognition of her work which helped create drug treatments for leukemia, malaria, and AIDS.
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14:58Number 1. The Gila Cells.
15:00Henrietta Lacks.
15:14Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old African-American woman who, in 1951,
15:18found out that she was seriously ill with cervical cancer.
15:21She underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland in the U.S.
15:25There, following a biopsy, her cells were taken without her consent or knowledge for medical research.
15:31This was common practice at the time,
15:33but the treatment of Lacks' particular cells would go down in history.
15:37They were found to be extremely durable, for whatever reason.
15:41They could be kept alive while other human cells couldn't be,
15:44so much so that the cell line is still alive today.
15:47It was really, in my opinion, the launch pad,
15:51probably the greatest discovery in biomedical research in the last half of the 20th century.
16:00It has led to numerous discoveries.
16:03Known as Gila cells, they've become one of the most important tools in modern medicine,
16:08used extensively in experiments and for scientific discoveries,
16:11including for developing vaccines and studying cancer treatments.
16:15The circumstances under which her cells were taken means that her story is also one of controversy,
16:20especially as Lacks unfortunately died after just a few months of treatment in October 1951.
16:26But her unwitting contribution to medicine has had and still has an immeasurable impact,
16:31saving countless millions of lives.
16:34We all feel like we're connected to this beautiful woman,
16:37who we call the mother of medicine.
16:41It really makes you think about how powerful an impact one person unknowingly could make.
16:48Which of these incredible people do you find most inspiring?
16:50Let us know in the comments.
16:52If x-rays killed Marie, then she was a different kind of martyr.
16:58Her life ended prematurely, like so many others, as the result of her efforts in the Great War.
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