By Brian Boone
September 15 to October 15 marks National Hispanic Heritage Month. It’s a way to honor and elevate the contributions of U.S. citizens and residents with a Hispanic or Latin American background. Here then are some Hispanic and Latine inventors and scientists who changed the world with their creations and developments.
ALEJANDRO ZAFFARONI
Born in Uruguay and earning a doctorate at the University of Rochester, Zaffaroni specialized in pharmaceuticals, and he was particularly interested in new, more efficient ways to get medicine into the body. His biggest achievement: He invented the transdermal patch, a thin piece of plastic that sticks on the skin and sends medication or drugs into the body via absorption. In 1968, he created ALZA Corp, which brought 20 transdermal patch-based drugs to the market, before it was bought out by Johnson & Johnson. Ever since, dozens of drugs have been FDA-approved for the patch method, including hormones, antidepressants, painkillers, and smoking cessation aids.
ELENA T. MEDO
In the 1990s, the California-born Elena T. Medo revolutionized breast pump technology with her invention and patenting of the pump with wall vacuum. Not only did it instantly make the device, used to procure mother’s milk for nursing infants to consume at a later time, more lightweight, but more effective. Medo then went on to form the Mother’s Milk Cooperative, an organization which pays mothers for their milk which can be shipped to underserved areas and disaster relief zones to feed babies separated temporarily and permanently from their mothers. That milk is shippable in large part to Medo’s company, Medolac Laboratories, which developed the technology to make breast milk preservable and shelf stable.
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LUIS VON AHN
Guatemalan-born mathematician Luis von Ahn came to the U.S. in the 1990s to earn a degree at Duke University, and then got his master’s and doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. He led the team that created the simple but wildly effective anti-bot internet security measure known as CAPTCHA. That thing where you have to type in a word or identify objects in photos to prove you’re a real-human being and not an insidious program? Ahn created that, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test for telling Computers and Humans Apart.” After giving away the technology to Yahoo and other internet corporations to distribute it fast, von Ahn went on to create and develop the language-learning app Duolingo.
JULIO PALMAZ
Palmaz invented and developed the medical technology that routinely saves millions of lives. After earning his M.D. and practicing as a physician in his native Argentina, Palmaz joined the faculty at the University of Texas Health and Science Center at San Antonio, where he led the team that built the first effective, expandable balloon-based intravascular stent, in 1985. By the mid-1990s, the device was FDA approved for the heart and arteries. It works to unclog and open up narrow passageways, expanding them by filling the stent with air. More than a million coronary and heart patients each year get a stent installed, thus extending their lives indefinitely.
DR. ELLEN OCHOA
Ochoa holds three patents from disparate fields. She helped invent the optical inspection system and an optical recognition method, as well as a way to improve photographs via a “noise” removal method. Not only that, but Ochoa is an astronaut. She’s the Johnson Space Center’s first director of Latin American descent, and its second female director, previously serving as Deputy Center Director and Director of Flight Crew Operations. Oh, and she went to space, too. The first Hispanic woman in space, she served nine days on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1993, the first of her four off-planet trips.