Medicine
Five real newspaper headlines about medicine, printed between 1922 and 2020, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.
There are 4 rounds of five in this topic, and a new one appears whenever the archive has enough for it.
Headline one
The Toronto Star
1922
In January 1922, Dr Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully treated a 14-year-old diabetic patient, Leonard Thompson, with insulin at Toronto General Hospital. The discovery transformed diabetes from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable condition. Banting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine the following year.
Headline two
The Sunday Times
1962
The thalidomide scandal came to full public attention in the early 1960s after the sedative drug, widely prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness, was linked to severe birth defects in thousands of children across the UK, Europe, and Australia. An estimated 10,000 babies worldwide were born with malformed limbs as a result of their mothers taking the drug. The scandal led to sweeping reforms in drug testing and regulatory approval processes across the world.
Headline three
Los Angeles Times
1981
In June 1981, the US Centers for Disease Control reported a cluster of rare pneumonia cases among young gay men in Los Angeles, marking the first published recognition of what would become the AIDS epidemic. The disease, caused by HIV, would go on to kill tens of millions of people worldwide. Its emergence transformed medicine, politics and society in the final decades of the twentieth century.
Headline four
The New York Times
2003
In April 2003, the Human Genome Project announced the successful sequencing of the entire human genetic code, comprising approximately 3 billion base pairs. The international scientific collaboration, which began in 1990, was hailed as one of the greatest achievements in the history of biology. The completed map opened new frontiers in medicine, including personalised treatments and the understanding of genetic diseases.
Headline five
The Times
2020
On 2 December 2020 the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use, following authorisation by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. The first vaccinations began on 8 December, with 90-year-old Margaret Keenan making history as the first person in the world to receive the approved vaccine outside a clinical trial. The rollout marked a pivotal moment in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
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