Google celebrates Carlos Juan Finlay's 180th birthday in latest doodle

Google has released a doodle to commemorate the birthday of Cuban physician and scientist, Carlos Juan Finlay, today. The scientist was the first one to theorise that yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes.

The doodle is not an interactive one but is hard hitting nevertheless. It shows a reflection of Finlay in a pool of stagnant water. There are leaves that form the letters of the word “Google” and there are mosquitoes breeding on them in the stagnant water.

Commemorating Finlay’s birthday

Finlay was born in 1833 in Cuba and was of French and Scottish descent. He attended Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and went on to complete his studies in Havana and Paris. Finlay then settled back in Cuba to open a medical practice.

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The scientist was chosen by the Cuban government in 1879 to work with a North American commission which was studying the causes of yellow fever. A couple of years later, he was sent to the fifth International Sanitary Conference in Washington DC as the Cuban delegate.

Finlay, at the conference, urged the delegates to study yellow fever vectors. He theorised that the carrier of yellow fever was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, or the Aedes aegypti. This hypothesis by Finlay was confirmed by Dr Walter Reed of the US army. Thus began the process of isolating and eradicating yellow fever in southern US, South America and the Caribbean and Africa. The scientist passed away at the age of 81 at his home in Havana, Cuba in 1915 of a seizure induced stroke.