1846 MORTON, William Thomas Green (1819 – 1868); JACKSON, Charles Thomas (1805 – 1880)

U. S. Patent No. 4848. The United States of America. To all to whom these Letters Patent shall come.... November 12, 1846.

U.S. Patent No. 4848, issued to Charles T. Jackson and William T. G. Morton on November 12, 1846 for the discovery of sulfuric ether as a surgical anesthetic. This was the first truly significant medical patent ever i…

GMN 7310 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/9480

1847 JACKSON, Charles Thomas (1805 – 1880)

Première Lettre. Boston, le 13 november 1846.

Jackson, a physician, geologist and chemist in Boston, wrote this letter to Élie de Beaumont in Paris on November 13, 1846, the day after he and William T. G. Morton jointly received U.S. Patent No. 4848 for Improveme…

GMN 7249 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/9418

1931 BOSENBERG, Henry F. (1883 – 1962)

U. S. Plant patent 1. Climbing or trailing rose. Filed Aug. 6, 1930. Issued Aug. 18, 1931.

This was the first patent granted for a life form. In response to complaints from the nursery industry that the future of the plant breeding industry was jeopardized by the “pirating” of new plant varieties, President…

GMN 14209 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/16525

1969 –1972 BLUMBERG, Baruch Samuel (1925 – 2011); MILLMAN, Irving (1923 – 2012)

Vaccine against viral hepatitis and process. Serial No. 864,788 filed 10 /8 /[19]69. Patent 3636191 issued 1/ 18/ [19]72.

First description of the hepatitis B vaccine, the first cancer vaccine, US patent 3636191A. Millman and Blumberg discovered that the blood of individuals carrying the hepatitis B virus contained particles of the outsi…

GMN 6841 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/9005

1973 COHEN, Stanley Norman (1935 – ); CHANG, Annie C.Y. (1936 – ); HELLING, Robert Bruce (1936 – 2006); BOYER, Herbert Wayne (1936 – )

Construction of biologically functional bacterial plasmids in vitro.

Cohen, Boyer and associates developed the first practical method for cloning genes, by the formation of recombinant plasmids which can be used to infect plasmid-free bacteria. The authors demonstrated that if DNA is f…

GMN 257.5 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/8715

2009 FRAZER, Ian Hector (1953 – ); ZHOU, Jian (1957 – 1999)

Papillomavirus vaccines. US Patent US7476389B1.

Frazer and Zhou invented and patented the first Papillomavirus vaccine. In 2020 it was marketed as Gardasil and Cervarix. Developed beginning in 1991, about 20 years after Blumberg and Millman's vaccine against viral …

GMN 12665 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/14909

2014 GABRIEL, Joseph M.

Medical monopoly: Intellectual property rights and the origins of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

GMN 11612 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/13812

2015 JACKSON, Myles W. (1964 – )

The genealogy of a gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and race.

"Myles Jackson uses the story of the CCR5 gene to investigate the interrelationships among science, technology, and society. Mapping the varied “genealogy” of CCR5—intellectual property, natural selection, Big and Sma…

GMN 11368 · https://historyofmedicine.com/id/13567