Who has done the most good to the human race?
![[Deleted User]](https://wc.vanillicon.com/v2/c8e50353c5f029e96f97b7b92ac1f329.svg)
[Deleted User]
Posts: 68,508 Forum Member
✭✭
I was contemplating that question, and failing to come up with an answer.
Someone who has invented a medical treatment perhaps? Antibiotics?
Someone who has contributed music, literature or art that has thrilled millions of people?
Someone who has brought peace to war-torn areas?
Who has found a way of improving the quality of life of huge numbers of people?
I would love to have some suggestions (I am working on a list, but it is too uncertain to be subject to public scrutiny just yet.)
Someone who has invented a medical treatment perhaps? Antibiotics?
Someone who has contributed music, literature or art that has thrilled millions of people?
Someone who has brought peace to war-torn areas?
Who has found a way of improving the quality of life of huge numbers of people?
I would love to have some suggestions (I am working on a list, but it is too uncertain to be subject to public scrutiny just yet.)
0
Comments
Norman borlaug.
Father of the green revolution.
Edward Jenner perhaps?
The more I think about this, the more never-ending my list is.
Obviously, us humans are pretty cool at times.
I had to google him. Which is a bit disconcerting since I see that he has been called "the man who saved a billion lives."
Yeah, i'd like to see their workings on that.
Still, even at a fraction of that, it's not bad.
I bags Fleming for Penicillin, but also the unknown scientists who strived for years to invent a reliable and cheap way of making tons of the stuff .
His discovery of vitamin D not only led to the elimination of childhood rickets, but its use was key to the switch to the industrialisation and intensification of chicken farming. Cheap chicken meat being reckoned to be the most important contribution to improved public health after WW2.
So benefit to humans yes, benefit to chickens - debatable.
No one person, it's a tapestry. Even if you reached a conclusion, the events that lead to the person making that difference was caused by an almost infinite series of events, choices and actions (or inactions) by numerous other individuals, all which lead to that one discovery/action. Say X came up with a massive medical breakthrough. Yes they deserve credit, but what if 10 years ealier X almost died in an accident but was saved by a passer by. The passer by had a massive impact on Xs life and indirectly, on the lives of every other person the eventual medical breakthrough helped.
Periodic Table was his name I think, what a geezer.
Fleming didn't actually do much. He discovered Penicillin and noted that it may be useful, but didn't do much else.
It was the work of Howard Florey and his team during WWII trying, at first, to establish Penicillin as a medicine, then striving to make it a reliable treatment which saved countless lives.
Benjamin Franklin is the main person credited for this. Yeah, he was fantastic.
Led to Thomas Edison inventing the commercially available light bulb.