The History of Newborn Screening

This historical overview is delivered by Dr. Harvey Levy, Senior Physician in Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston, and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.  In this 40 minute talk and slide presentation, offered here in ten short video sections, Dr. Levy covers the history of newborn screening, starting with the origin of the concept of errors of inborn metabolism in the early 1900s, covering Dr. Robert Guthrie’s development of newborn screening for PKU, and moving through current screening methods and public health approaches.

Click a number to view a section:  1  –  2  -  3  –  4  -  5  -  6  -  7  -  8  -  9  -  10

Part 1 – Events That Led Up to Newborn Screening

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Part 2 – Dr. Robert Guthrie

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Part 3 – The Guthrie Test

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Part 4 – Standardizing Newborn PKU Screening

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Part 5 – The Public Health Approach

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Part 6 – Other Inborn Errors in Metabolism

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Part 7 – Expanding Newborn Screening

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Part 8 – Newborn Screening Challenges

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Part 9 – What’s Being Done

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Part 10 – Closing Notes

This video talk and slideshow on the History of Newborn Screening is also available as a Flash Cast. Click here to view it.