How Canada has contributed to the understanding of health and disease

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I believe that Canada has contributed a lot to the understanding of health and disease over the years. A few examples I have been able to come up with would be the discovery of Insulin by Frederick Banting and Charles Best in 1921, and Dr. Penfield’s discovery on treating epilepsy using a method called the Montreal Procedure in 1934. George Klein invented the electric wheelchair in 1952, and in. Doctors James E. Till and Ernest A. McCulloch discovered the “hemopoietic stem cell” in 1961, which played a crucial part in the transplantation of bone marrow and treating certain diseases later on. These discoveries have helped to make the world a healthier place. Of course, along with diseases and cures come many more diseases. Third world countries suffer less from diseases such as cancer and diabetes because they do not have an advanced health care like first world countries do. http://www.diabetes.org.uk/How_we_help/Magazines/Balance/Past-issues/Jan-Feb-2012/The-discovery-that-changed-our-world1/ Before the discovery of Insulin, the life changing hormone that had originated from the research and experiments of Charles Best and Frederick Banting, Type 1 Diabetes was considered to be a death sentence to anyone who was diagnosed with it. It was just a matter of a few months to a year, a countdown until someone found them laying on their deathbed. In the late 1800’s, scientists discovered that by removing the pancreas of a dog, it caused it to suffer from Diabetes. This started a surge of research from many scientists, but no one was able to come up with a cure for this killer disease. That is, until 1921 when Frederick Banting, along with Charles Best, were able to successfully extract insulin fr...

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...eal or repair themselves, but after a breakthrough in Spinal cord research, done on a rat, it was discovered that the spinal cord “can support the development of transplanted cells”. Several anesthetised rats were given spinal cord injuries and after about two weeks, scientists transplanted human nerve stem cells into their injured spinal cords. Three months after the rats were injected with the human nerve stem cells, the scientists found that some of the stem cells had developed into support cells instead of nerve cells, yet some had developed into mature nerve cells. After about six months, the scientists discovered to their disbelief not only did the human stem cells survive in the rats’ spinal cords, but they underwent mitosis at least twice, and there were three times the amount of human stem cells found in the rats than the amount that was injected initially.