--- title: Google Doodle Celebrates Dr. Virginia Apgar's 109th Birthday description: Google Doodle is celebrating Dr. Virginia Apgar, who invented the Apgar score that has saved countless newborn lives. She would have 109 canonical: https://time.com/5304372/google-doodle-virginia-apgar/ author: Mahita Gajanan article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-06-07T13:19:04.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:47:16.231Z og:title: Meet Dr. Virginia Apgar, the Anesthesiologist Credited With Saving Many Newborn Babies' Lives og:description: She would have been 109 today og:url: https://time.com/5304372/google-doodle-virginia-apgar/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3672fcfde2872f7c/69893287ab6d779a446b2e47/virginia-apgar-google-doodle.gif?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 711 og:image:height: 400 og:image:alt: virginia-apgar-google-doodle og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Meet Dr. Virginia Apgar, the Anesthesiologist Credited With Saving Many Newborn Babies' Lives twitter:description: She would have been 109 today twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3672fcfde2872f7c/69893287ab6d779a446b2e47/virginia-apgar-google-doodle.gif?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google Doodle Honors Dr. Virginia Apgar, the Anesthesiologist Credited With Saving Many Newborn Babies' Lives > Sponsored content. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=fa68556b-b6a1-4fcc-828e-66146f0b8523&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Mahita Gajanan](https://time.com/author/mahita-gajanan/) ## Mahita Gajanan Gajanan is an editor at TIME. Jun 7, 2018 1:19 PM UTC  Google by [Mahita Gajanan](https://time.com/author/mahita-gajanan/) ## Mahita Gajanan Gajanan is an editor at TIME. Jun 7, 2018 1:19 PM UTC Google is celebrating Dr. Virginia Apgar, a groundbreaking figure in the field of anesthesiology known for inventing a scoring system that is credited with saving countless newborn babies’ lives, with its new [Google Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/dr-virginia-apgars-109th-birthday). Born in 1909 in New Jersey, she is best known for inventing the Apgar Score, the first standardized way to test a newborn baby’s health in the first few minutes after the baby is born. Babies are assessed under five factors: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration. The first letter of each factor spells out Apgar’s name. While Apgar died in 1974, the Google Doodle celebrates what would have been Apgar’s 109th birthday and features a cartoon of her conducting her namesake test, which was invented the test in 1952. > [](https://twitter.com/JohnsHopkinsSPH/status/1004696690899800064) Aside from the Apgar Score, she also accomplished numerous feats throughout her career. Apgar was the first woman to become a full professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. But her path to success was filled with numerous obstacles. Although she was determined to become a surgeon, Apgar was [discouraged from the pursuit](https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography%5F12.html) by Dr. Alan Whipple, who was the chair of surgery at Columbia. Whipple maintained that the other women he had trained had failed to establish successful careers in surgery. But Whipple also recognized that Apgar’s skill could further the field of anesthesia, and she spent a year training in it after completing her surgical residency in 1937\. Ahead of her time, Apgar had trouble finding people to work for her until anesthesia became a more acknowledged specialty in the 1940s, according to the [U.S. National Library of Medicine](https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography%5F12.html). Later, Apgar’s studies of obstetrical anesthesia led to her creating the Apgar score. After some initial resistance, the testing method became widely used throughout the world and is still used today. ## Transcript [00:01] >>The Doodle [00:07] team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, [00:10] and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even [00:13] sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially [00:17] collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate [00:21] with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on [00:25] this project. [00:34] >>We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and [00:36] we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, [00:39] flowers and things like that. But Ira and his [00:44] team are awesome. [00:44] >>They were able to pull stories that they have collected [00:47] over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and [00:49] they're all about love in all different respects of the word. [00:55] They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really [00:58] fun and really sweet. [00:59] >>The stories run the [ unk ]. There is [01:03] a story about middle school love. [01:03] >>I was in the cafeteria, just got [01:07] on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. [01:11] >>There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that [01:14] she made a mistake. [01:14] >>My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I [01:14] could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and [01:20] I-- and I called the police because I thought [01:24] he got lost or something happened. [01:28] >>When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I [01:31] listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of [01:34] where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. [01:37] >>One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. [01:43] We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just [01:46] drew everyone as a dog. [01:47] >>Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. [01:47] >>And when you click on it, the heart will flip, [01:52] the audio will play and you will also see the images that [01:55] we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, [01:59] now we are all going to brainstorms together because we [02:02] need the creative side and we also need the technical side [02:04] to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this [02:08] one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, [02:12] because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I [02:15] first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only [02:17] did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more [02:21] animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we [02:24] needed a dedicated team. [02:24] >>Some of our most like ambitious to those have come [02:26] from engineers that are just incredibly talented [02:30] and spare similar time for our projects. [02:33] >>Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that [02:36] is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology [02:41] hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too [02:43] conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to [02:46] tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. [02:53] The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep [02:56] my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting [03:00] a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw [03:03] and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." [03:07] >>We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. [03:08] We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences [03:11] are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what [03:14] you're gonna get. 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