Johns Hopkins University turns 150 this month, starting a year-long celebration with fun events, retrospectives, and conversations.
There will be a Birthday Kickoff and Ice Rink Closing Day on Sunday, Feb. 22 at 2 p.m. This event is free, though registration is required.
Hopkins is famous for research and its world-renowned medical school, but did you know it is where the rubber glove and GPS were invented? Many of these lifechanging innovations seem commonplace today, though that they originated at Hopkins is not common knowledge. But first, some school history.
HISTORY
Johns Hopkins University opened its doors in 1876 led by Daniel Coit Gilman, its first president. Named after 19th-century Maryland philanthropist Johns Hopkins, whose focus lay in local and global public health and education, the school aimed for top-tier research and academic status.
Hopkins, the man, was one of 11 children. He made his money as a businessman and by investing in new industries, including the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Past accounts of Johns Hopkins portray him as an early abolitionist whose own parents freed the family’s enslaved people. Recent research and discoveries of census records from that time, however, show that Hopkins did enslave people until the mid-1800s.
In his will, Hopkins left $7 million to be used for establishing a hospital, affiliated training colleges, an orphanage, and a university – at the time, it was the largest philanthropic bequest in the nation’s history. In Gilman’s inaugural address at the university’s opening, he described the university’s mission in a way that remains unchanged: “To educate its students and cultivate their capacity for lifelong learning, to foster independent and original research, and to bring the benefits of discovery to the world.”
THE RUBBER GLOVE
Ideally, it is unthinkable for a surgeon to operate on a patient without wearing rubber gloves. The original motivation for inventing them, however, was not patient safety.
In 1890, William Stewart Halsted, one of the four founding doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital and its first surgeon-in-chief, asked the Goodyear Rubber Company to make thin rubber gloves for his nurse and future wife, Caroline Hampton. This was to protect her hands from the harsh disinfectants used in operating rooms. Other staff members began wearing them for the same reason, and the hospital noticed a corresponding sharp decrease in patients’ infections. Gloves no longer must be made of rubber – typically latex or vinyl – but they are mandatory for surgical and patient procedures.
Historical/cultural note: “Death By Lightning” (Netflix) viewers will recall the cringe-inducing scenes during which after President Andrew Garfield was shot, the white doctor in charge, Willard Bliss, sticks his ungloved finger directly into Garfield’s bullet wound in an attempt to retrieve the bullet. Dr. Charles Purvis, the first Black doctor to attend to a sitting U.S. president, objects to working on Garfield with unsterile instruments, and the danger of germs, but Bliss rejects the new research on “germs” and “sterility” (and the Black doctor’s warnings) out of hand. Garfield ultimately died of sepsis, not the bullet wounds. This was in 1881, nine years before Halsted’s request of Goodyear.
GPS
In 1957, scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) played a significant role in the technology that became the Global Positioning System (GPS) we know today. Robert L. Henderson, William S. Devereux, and Thomas Thompson explained the evolution in detail for “Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest” in 2010.
Part of the groundwork was laid during World War II when APL developed a way to use Doppler measurements to time the detonation of artillery shells. More than a decade later, the U.S. was in a space race with the Soviet Union. APL helped the U.S. Navy track the orbit of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, also using Doppler technology.
However, Frank McClure, an APL employee, saw the opportunity to invert the process and use satellites to help find a ground-based receiver. This led to the creation of the Navy’s Transit navigation system, the precursor to modern GPS. In the late 1960s and 1970s, APL took part in studies evaluating constellation and navigation signal alternatives.
“Although not a direct participant in the GPS space segment development, APL has been a heavy participant in critical developments within the GPS user segment from the very beginning,” wrote the authors. “In fact, …a Navy system designed by APL was the first committed user of GPS.”
Historical/cultural note: Gladys West was a mathematician whose pioneering work proved crucial to the creation of GPS. Because she was a Black woman, however, West was not credited at the time in the prime of her career. She was later acknowledged as the “hidden figure” of GPS. (“Hidden Figures” was a book, then movie, highlighting the work of African-American women who worked as NASA mathematicians who helped launch the U.S. Space program in the 1960s.) West received many notable awards and recognition in the last decades of her life, including becoming the first woman to win the Prince Philip Medal, awarded by the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering. The U.S. Space Force contends that without her work, the GPS we have today would not be possible.
THE DEFIBRILLATOR AND CPR
The 1950s were a decade of discovery in more down-to-earth ways at Hopkins as well, given that in 1957 and 1958, its researchers developed both the first cardiac defibrillator and the procedure for manual cardiopulmonary resuscitation: commonly known as CPR.
William B. Kouwenhoven came to Hopkins in 1914 to teach in the then-Department of Electrical Engineering. He was not a medical doctor but was interested in the effect of electricity on the human body, and the relationship between electricity and medicine. Kouwenhoven’s scientific mission was to save lives using electricity.
In 1925, the New York gas and electric company Con Edison selected the then-Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health to study why utility linemen accidentally jolted by even small amounts of electricity were suddenly dying from ventricular fibrillation (VF). VF causes the heart to beat out of rhythm, and ultimately to stop pumping blood. Kouwenhoven was added to the team for Con Edison’s study.
Experimenting on a dog’s heart in 1933, the team discovered that sending a second jolt of electricity through the heart (which Kouwenhoven called a “countershock”), restored the heart’s normal rhythm. This was called “defibrillation” and was applied to the first human patient during open-chest cardiac resuscitation in 1947. Kouwenhoven knew, however, that in the field, open-chest surgery was not an option should a lineman go into VF.
In 1951, Hopkins’ medical school’s Department of Surgery used an Edison Electric Institute grant to launch Kouwenhoven’s research into developing a closed-chest defibrillator. He wanted something that “would be portable, effective, simple to operate, and the shock of which could be sent through the chest of an individual whose heart was beating normally, without fear of injury.” Six years later, after extensive testing on animals, the Hopkins A-C Closed Chest Defibrillator made its debut, weighing in at an unwieldy 200 pounds, transported on a rolling cart. On March 17, 1957, a 42-year-old man became the first human patient to have his heart shocked back into proper rhythm using the Hopkins A-C Closed Chest Defibrillator.
Still searching for more solutions to cardiac arrest, a member of Kouwenhoven’s team noticed that simply placing defibrillator paddles on a dog’s chest caused a rise in blood pressure. After trying different hand positions, rhythms, and techniques, they discovered that with the right combination of “closed chest cardiac massage” and “artificial respiration” they could resuscitate patients in cardiac arrest. They called this process cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Between 1959 and 1960, 20 Hopkins patients in cardiac arrest were administered CPR, and all were resuscitated.
Kouwenhoven, by then 74 years old, wrote, “This was the breakthrough we were looking for.”
Historical/cultural note: Despite common conception, CPR does not require blowing into a person’s mouth. There is a hands-only technique that everyone can learn: pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest and calling 911. The American Medical Association (AMA), an organization founded in 1847, says education surrounding CPR must change, and that most people have no formal training in CPR. Awareness is improving, though, and the AMA has a wealth of free resources on their website.
THE LIST GOES ON…
The impact of Hopkins discoveries on the everyday lives of Baltimoreans, Marylanders, and the world defies the limitations of one article. There was that time in 1919 Hopkins graduate Abel Wolman discovered how to use chlorine to purify drinking water in Baltimore – a technique then copied in cities around the U.S. APL took the first color photograph of the Earth from space in 1967. It was a woman at Hopkins in the 1970s who identified the high rates of infant mortalities in car crashes, leading to the passage of child safety restraint laws in the U.S.
Perhaps only a few of us might land a spacecraft on an asteroid (2001), but millions of us benefitted from Hopkins’ Coronavirus Resource Center (2020) tracking the COVID-19 pandemic with its famous map. How many are deriving hope from breakthroughs from Hopkins research in immunotherapy and mRNA-based treatments (2024) that are radically improving the battle against cancer? Would any of these breakthroughs be possible without Henrietta Lacks?
Lacks was a Baltimore County woman battling cervical cancer in the 1950s. Hopkins was one of only a few hospitals who treated Black people at the time. Treatment was not successful, and she died in October 1951. Without her knowledge or consent, however, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital had given samples of her cancerous cells to a researcher, who discovered her cells had a unique capacity to reproduce and survive rendering them essentially immortal. For decades after her death, her cells, named HeLa cells, were used without her family’s consent by companies who profited from them through scientific research.
Over the last decade, many scientific and medical organizations have begun working with the Lacks family to attempt to remedy that harm, including Hopkins, which never sold or profited from the HeLa cells, but did offer them for research. In October 2024, Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital hosted descendants of Lacks at the groundbreaking of a building that will bear her name.
The Henrietta Lacks Building in East Baltimore will house the Berman Institute of Bioethics and programs of both Hopkins University and School of Medicine.
Learn more about Baltimore-based Hopkins research milestones as the school celebrates its 150th year.
