Top 10 Times 1 Person Saved Millions of Lives

Henry Heimlich
The frightening truth is that there are countless ways in which a person could suddenly die within seconds. But we have the American surgeon, Dr. Henry Heimlich, to thank for providing a universally used solution for one of them; choking. The Heimlich Maneuver is a first aid technique used to save choking victims. Developed in the 1970s by Dr. Heimlich, it works by applying pressure to the diaphragm, which then dislodges food (or other objects) that are blocking a person's airway. Today it’s a fundamental and essential skill taught in CPR courses, and it’s a technique that everyone is recommended to know. Ultimately, it’s impossible to place a number on how many lives the Heimlich maneuver has saved in the 50+ years it's been in use, but it can be applied at any moment and all around the world, to prevent disaster.

Marie Curie
At the outbreak of World War One in 1914, Marie Curie was already a world renowned pioneer of science. Her work on radioactivity led to the first of two Nobel Prizes in 1903, with the second coming in 1911 for her discovery of polonium and radium. But even after all of that, she by no means rested. During the War, Curie set up a fleet of mobile x-ray units. They became known as Petite Curies, and they were continuously sent into the heart of the battle, wherever wounded soldiers needed aid. Curie recruited her own daughter to help with the effort, and is said to have hurriedly learned how to drive a car, purely so that she could help with the war effort. Again, we simply cannot calculate precisely how many lives were saved thanks to Curie’s efforts, but her mobile units were vital to those on the front.

Norman Borlaug
Known as the Father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug was an agronomist - an expert in soil and crops - whose large-scale work on improving yields totally transformed agriculture in the twentieth century. His most famous and impactful contributions were in the growing of wheat. Starting in Mexico in the mid-1940s, Borlaug worked (both in a team and individually) to develop variously hardy and high-yield varieties of the staple crop, at a time when Mexico had been notably struggling to produce enough for demand. After more than a decade working on the venture, Borlaug then took his findings world wide, and especially into South Asia. There, his supercrop sparked another sea change in the farming industry, again dramatically improving the yield. There’s no telling just how important Borlaug’s work was, but some calculate that it could be responsible for saving not just millions but billions of people, worldwide.

Jonas Salk
In history, there have been many crucial developments of vital vaccines. It was Britain’s Edward Jenner who created the world’s first of any type, for Smallpox, in 1796. Meanwhile, and in modern times, there was the American microbiologist, Maurice Hilleman, who delivered more than 40 vaccines, including one of the most widely administered, for MMR. Jonas Salk was another hugely influential figure in the mid-twentieth century, though. An American virologist, he developed one of history's most important medicines - the polio vaccine. Before Salk, polio had been a devastating disease that caused paralysis and death, and primarily affected children. Salk reportedly worked flat out for years to develop a treatment, however, and in 1955 the Polio shot was released. Within 25 years, the disease had been eliminated from America. Today, the miracle jab has ridden almost all of the rest of the world of it, as well.

Alan Turing
In times of war, there are some who truly step up. Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist, but he also goes down as one of the most important figures of World War Two thanks to his code-breaking work against Nazi Germany. At Britain's Bletchley Park, Turing led a team that successfully cracked Germany's infamous Enigma code. In short, Turing’s genius meant that the Allied forces were able to intercept (and understand) thousands of German messages every single day, during the height of the conflict. There is no one exact moment when Enigma was broken, but Turing led a series of urgent breakthroughs which ultimately enabled Britain to monitor communications that had once been indecipherable. It was a crucial win for Allied intelligence, and is said to have significantly shortened the duration of the War - thereby, again, potentially saving untold millions of lives.

Tu Youyou
Malaria is easily one of the most damaging and deadly diseases in human history. Estimates vary, but at their highest it’s predicted that it may even have been responsible for up to half of all human deaths, ever. Therefore, anyone who contributes to the fight against it has the potential to save a lot of people. It was the Chinese pharmaceutical chemist, Tu Youyou, who perhaps made the greatest breakthrough of all, though. In the late 1960s, she worked as a lead scientist on Project 523 - a Chinese effort to develop antimalarial drugs, in response to rising malaria deaths in the Vietnam War. Tu Youyou, whose research primarily drew upon traditional Chinese medicine, soon discovered artemisinin, in 1972 - a drug group that’s now used worldwide as a first-line treatment for malaria. Her findings were initially published anonymously but, in 2015, she got the credit deserved when she won the Nobel Prize, then aged 84.

Alexander Fleming
Some people work for years specifically to change the world, others manage to do it by accident. The latter happened to Alexander Fleming, a Scottish biologist who in 1928 by chance discovered penicillin - the world’s first antibiotic - while studying bacteria growth at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. So the story goes, Fleming had accidentally left the lid off a petri dish before going on holiday. And, when he returned, he discovered that that dish was now hosting a new kind of mold - penicillin - which had killed the bacteria that should’ve been there. His observation that the mold inhibited bacterial growth led to the development of antibiotics, and to one of the most profound and seismic revolutions in medical history. Countless infections that were once life-threatening, now weren’t. Untold lives that may have once been lost could now be saved.

Stanislav Petrov
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant colonel, operating amidst the Cold War. On September 26th of that year, he also saved the world. On that day, Petrov correctly identified incoming nuclear missile alerts as being false alarms. To all appearances, the data said that a multi-missile attack had been launched against the Soviet Union, by the United States… a move which should’ve resulted in a Soviet counter, and nuclear war within minutes. Rather than immediately launching retaliatory strikes, however, Petrov’s calm judgment and instinct urged him to think twice. And he was right to hesitate. The US hadn’t launched an attack, the USSR wasn’t under threat, and nuclear war didn’t need to begin. Nevertheless, it very nearly did begin, were it not for Petrov, whose actions effectively saved the millions of lives that would’ve been lost.

Vasily Arkhipov
Twenty-one years prior to when Stanislav Petrov averted nuclear disaster, something similar had played out in the waters around Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, goes down as arguably the closest humankind has ever come to nuclear war. However, when the infamous stand-off was at its most tense, the actions of one Soviet naval officer may have single-handedly prevented the worst from happening. Vasily Arkhipov was serving aboard the B-59 submarine at the time, where he was one of three high-ranking officials who had to all agree in order for a nuclear weapon to be launched. When, amongst all the geopolitical turmoil of the time, the other two officials voted, yes, to launch an attack against the US, Arkhipov was the only dissenting voice. As such, nothing was launched, their submarine surfaced, and the watching world avoided a nuclear catastrophe. Although it wasn’t until years later that just how close we came was fully revealed.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Karl Landsteiner
He was the first to identify and classify blood into the groups A, B and O, which quickly led to the first successful blood transfusions in the early 1900s

James Harrison
Known as the Man with the Golden Arm, Harrison gave 1,173 blood plasma donations over more than 60 years, and his rare blood type has saved millions of babies

Gertrude Elion
Her breakthrough research led to the creation of azidothymidine (or AZT), the first widely used drug against HIV/AIDS

Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year old African-American woman who, in 1951, found out that she was seriously ill with cervical cancer. She underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Maryland, in the US. There, following a biopsy, her cells were taken without her consent or knowledge for medical research. This was common practice at the time, but the treatment of Lacks’ particular cells would go down in history. They were found to be extremely durable. For whatever reason, they could be kept alive while other human cells couldn’t be. So much so that the cell line is still alive today. Known as HeLa cells, they’ve become one of the most important tools in modern medicine; used extensively in experiments and for scientific discoveries, including for developing vaccines and studying cancer treatments. The circumstances under which her cells were taken means that her story is also one of controversy, especially as Lacks unfortunately died after just a few months of treatment, in October 1951. But, her unwitting contribution to medicine has had (and still has) an immeasurable impact, saving countless millions of lives.

Which of these incredible stories are you most amazed by? Which of these incredible people do you find most inspiring? Let us know in the comments!