41. Who says competition isn’t healthy? For five years, endocrinologists Andrew Victor Schally, BSc’55, PhD’59, DSc’79, and Roger Guillemin joined forces in the hunt for the fabled hypothalamic hormone. But their collaboration was so fraught with tension that, in 1962, they split to feverishly work solo. As luck would have it, the two men separately discovered the thyrotropin releasing factor, the hormone which controls metabolism. The rivals shared the 1977 Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work.

42. Sometimes huge ideas come in (very) small packages. Particle physicist Val Fitch, BEng’48, shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with James W. Cronin for an experiment disproving the long-held theory that particle interaction is indifferent to the direction of time. Their shocking revelation has huge implications for understanding the mechanics behind a little event called the creation of the universe.

43. While Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, is justly credited with being the driving force behind Canadian Confederation in 1867, a pair of McGill graduates played pivotal roles. A fiery orator and persuasive writer, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, BCL1861, helped popularize the notion of Confederation and took part in both the Charlottetown and Quebec City conferences that hammered out the resolutions for uniting British North America. Though, unlike McGee, he isn’t officially recognized as a Father of Confederation, Alexander Morris, BA1849, BCL1850, MA1852, DCL1862, was a vital behind-the-scenes player, one of the few politicians trusted by both Macdonald and his bitter arch-rival, George Brown, the two most powerful politicians of the day. When negotiations between the two threatened to break down, Morris stepped in to help save the talks that led to Confederation.

44. Among the major achievements of the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, BCL1864, LLD1898, were the creation of two new Canadian provinces in 1905 – Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alexander Rutherford, BA1881, BCL1881, served as Alberta’s first premier, further cementing our claim that McGill had a hand in the genesis of the sunshine province.

45. In 1945, Minister of Health and Welfare Brian Brooke Claxton, LLB’21, introduced Canadians to the “Baby Bonus” – the family allowance program.

46. In 1915, when a German U-Boat sunk the Lusitania, the outrage famously brought the United States into the Great War. The attack also brought Robert Boyle, BSc1905, PhD’09, into the fight. The physicist obtained the first PhD granted at McGill and it was his mentor, Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford, who recruited him for the British war effort. Boyle’s assignment was to invent something to counter the U-Boat menace choking Britain’s shipping lanes. His ultrasonic echo detection came too late to affect the course of the war, but it became the basis for the sonar systems still in use today.

47. David Pall, BSc’36, PhD’39, DSc87, made his fortune manufacturing filters for jet airlines and automobiles. But when the physical chemist learned that his wife needed a risky blood transfusion, he focused his skills in a different direction. Pall created a specialized filter that removed white blood cells from donated blood, substantially reducing the risk of blood-borne disease not only for his wife, but for millions of patients.

48. Men have huddled around campfires and shared their stories for centuries (and snapped towels at each other in locker rooms for generations), but “male bonding” has only been with us since 1969. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger, BA’57, MA’60, coined the term in Men in Groups, his seminal study of male behaviour in groups ranging from the Vatican Council to the New York Yankees.

49. Fuzzy-minded mornings are difficult enough, but imagine waiting twice as long for your flax-crusted whole-grain rhomboid to toast? Lift a latte in gratitude to Edward Plunket Taylor, BSc’22, LLD’77, who invented a two-sided multi-slice toaster while still an undergraduate at McGill. Waiting for his bread to brown one wintry morning, Taylor had his double-faced vision. He drew up some plans, and filed for the patent just two weeks after he turned 18. Taylor sold the rights and took his royalties to Montreal’s Blue Bonnets racetrack, beginning a lifelong interest in horse racing. Despite his household invention, he’s probably most famous today for breeding legendary Kentucky Derby winner Northern Dancer.

50. Harriet Brooks’s mentor, Ernest Rutherford, described her as the second most important woman working in the then nascent field of radioactivity. Given that the most important woman was the legendary Marie Curie, who would eventually garner two Nobel Prizes for her contributions, it was no mild compliment. With Rutherford as her supervisor, Brooks, BA1898, MSc1901, became the first woman to receive a master’s degree at McGill. After travelling to Europe to do research at Cambridge and then to collaborate with Curie, she returned to Rutherford’s lab at McGill to assist him in the work that would guide the efforts of nuclear physics for generations to come. It was Brooks who discovered radon, a gas that results from the decay of radium. Her work supplied pivotal evidence that nuclear transmutation – the notion that radioactive elements could change identity during release of radioactivity – was a real occurrence and not the stuff of fantasy.

51. Ernest Rutherford’s work in atomic physics also laid the foundation for radiometric dating as he applied the insights gained from studying the rate of decay of radioactive elements to determine the age of rocks. As a result of this technique, Rutherford correctly concluded that the Earth was in fact millions of years older than most believed at the time.

52. Nuclear physicist Robert Bell, PhD’48, was appointed McGill’s Ernest Rutherford Professor of Physics in 1960 and he lived up to the title, making important new contributions to the field that Rutherford essentially created. Chief among Bell’s accomplishments were the discovery of proton radioactivity (which led to new spectrometry techniques) and the invention of a timing method for measuring nuclear processes down to a fraction of a billionth of a second.

53. When Conrad Black, MA’73, created the National Post in 1998, he had two chief goals in mind – to promote conservative politics in the country and to introduce a snappier, British-inspired style of newspapering to Canada. With Stephen Harper now occupying 24 Sussex Drive and with the Post’s spunky, opinionated approach to journalism clearly influencing other major publications such as the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s, Black’s brainchild accomplished much of what it set out to do.

54. As a trailblazing champion of antiseptic practices in the operating room, Thomas Roddick, MDCM1868, became one of McGill’s most-fabled professors and physicians, but it was as a parliamentarian that he made his most lasting contribution to Canadian medicine. Roddick believed that doctors should be held to the same standards of quality in every province and that they should also be allowed to move their practices from one province to another. His private member’s bill championing these causes became the Canada Medical Act and received Royal Assent in 1906. The Medical Council of Canada, which licenses all Canadian doctors, is the direct result of this legislation.

55. With well over 100 patents to his name, W. Lincoln Hawkins, PhD’38, is the kind of McGill graduate that makes you want to call a far-flung friend to get the word out – and you can, thanks to his most important co-invention: a chemical additive that prevents the oxidization of the plastic covering of telecommunications cables, enabling phone companies to extend phone lines to distant areas. Hawkins, the first African-American to work in the prestigious Bell Laboratories, went on to devise a spectrometry test that could test the durability of plastics in a lab setting.

56. The Canadian Bar Association, which represents the country’s lawyers, judges, legal scholars and law students (about two-thirds of Canada’s practicing lawyers are card-carrying CBA members), was founded in 1914 by former McGill law professor Charles Joseph Doherty, BCL1876, DCL1893, LLD’13. The CBA plays an influential role in the development of law in this country, keeping its members up-to-speed on legal issues, often advising governments and even interceding in Supreme Court cases.

57. What’s the best way to defeat a disease? Attack it before it becomes a problem. That’s the strategy that McGill pediatrician and geneticist Charles Scriver, BA’51, MDCM’55, has employed and it’s hard to argue with his success rate. In the sixties, Scriver was probing rickets, a debilitating bone disease that afflicted children experiencing rapid growth spurts. When he discovered a link between rickets and vitamin D deficiency, he lobbied the Quebec government to add vitamin D to milk. Soon, the cases of rickets plummeted. The disease used to affect one child in 200. Now it’s rare. Scriver also developed a genetic screening program to identify individuals at a high risk for producing children with Tay-Sachs, a deadly and degenerative brain disorder. The incidence rate for Tay-Sachs has been reduced by more than 90 percent in the Montreal area, thanks in large part to Scriver’s work.

58. We’re quick to laud medical innovations that heal, but think less about the art and science of preserving dignity and alleviating suffering at the end of life. When McGill surgical oncologist Balfour Mount, himself a cancer survivor, looked into the medical literature surrounding care for the terminally ill, he was shocked to discover it was almost non-existent. Inspired by the work of British hospice pioneer Dame Cicely Saunders, Mount created North America’s first palliative care unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital and popularized palliative care as a medical specialty – he is even credited with coining the phrase. The RVH Manual on Palliative/Hospice Care, published in 1982, has served as a guidebook for similar programs around the world.

59. Cells don’t nap. When McGill cell biologist Charles Philippe Leblond, DSc’82, made this declaration in the forties, most of his colleagues were convinced that cells were only occasionally active. Leblond believed cells were always on the go (he was right). Thankfully he had evidence to back him up, courtesy of a technology he helped perfect – autoradiography, a process that involved injecting radioactive material into organisms and using these “tracers” to study where and how cellular processes took place. While autoradiography was first created in 1924, it was initially an erratic technique. By using thinner emulsion coats on the glass slides being analyzed and better radioactive isotopes to highlight the activity being examined, Leblond and his collaborators improved the ability of scientists to monitor cellular activity by a hundredfold. Autoradiography continues to be used today by molecular biologists studying the localization of genes and DNA sequences.

60. One of the prime architects of Quebec’s Civil Code is McGill law professor Paul-André Crépeau. When the code was updated and modernized in the sixties, Crépeau led the effort as the president of the Office of Revision of the Civil Code. Former Supreme Court of Canada justice Claire L'Heureux-Dubé says Crépeau was the right man for the job, crediting his “very broad knowledge of the law, his desire to produce a modern Civil Code, free of antiquated policies no longer relevant to Quebec’s dynamic and modern society, and his great talent for organization.” In 1975, Crépeau made another major contribution to Quebec law, working with McGill colleague F.R. Scott on the draft legislation that would eventually become the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

61. In becoming one of the chief leaders of the Canadian labour movement, Madeleine Parent made plenty of powerful enemies – including longtime Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis who at one point tried to imprison her for “seditious conspiracy.” Duplessis and the business leaders of his era were virulently opposed to unionization, but Parent, BA’40, LLD’02, would not be intimidated. In 1946, she led 6,000 Quebec cotton workers in a successful strike. When Parent came to the conclusion that the American labour leaders who ultimately controlled the union movement were unresponsive to the concerns of Canadian workers, she helped spearhead the creation of the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union (1952) and the Canadian Council of Unions (1969). Thanks in large part to her work, homegrown unions became a much more powerful force. In 1968, 70 percent of union workers in Canada contributed to American unions. By 1998, that rate had fallen to 30 percent.

62. In 1960, only one month into her new job, Frances Oldham Kelsey, BSc’34, MSc’35, saved thousands of children from birth defects by saying no. The freshly-hired Food and Drug Administration official was tasked with approving a sedative, thalidomide, for use in the U.S. The drug was already widely prescribed in Europe, but Kelsey noticed disquieting data suggesting dangerous side effects if the drug was used repeatedly. She refused approval and pressed for more studies of the drug, enraging its manufacturer. A year later, reports emerged of babies being born without arms or legs – children whose mothers took thalidomide during their pregnancies. In recognition of her diligence, President John F. Kennedy awarded Kelsey the highest honor given to a civilian in the U.S., the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.

Back to Ideas That Made History