June 30, 2003
The wonder drug
Alexander Fleming richly deserved the rewards he received late in his life. A Nobel prize, a knighthood, burial in St. Paul's Cathedral seem hardly out of proportion to the discovery of penicillin. The antibiotic saved thousands of soldiers' lives during World War II and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, since. Florey and Chain, the two men who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine, are a bit more obscure. Chain had a lengthy career in academia and Florey became head of the Royal Society, but only one man gets to be the "father of penicillin". Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's Fleming, the poorest scientist of the three.
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June 23, 2003
The Wizard of Gore
Herschell Gordon Lewis is a marketer. He is the author of the wildly successful how-to book, Writing Direct Mail Copy, as well as such other guides to selling as The Businessman's Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion, Writing Letters that Sizzle, How to Handle your own Public Relations. He was the author of Omaha Steaks' direct mail campaign. He's a senior fellow at the International Society for Strategic Marketing, and has worked as a marketing consultant for Lenscrafters and Barnes & Noble. His current career is, in fact, only a few shades removed from his previous incarnation as "the Godfather of Gore". Herschell Gordon Lewis made exploitation films.
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June 13, 2003
God and gold
Why did capitalism in its modern form take root in Europe, particularly Western Europe, and not elsewhere in the world? Max Weber tried to explain this in his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber was examining the sociological implications of Protestants' -- particularly Calvinists -- attitude towards work and investment. Drawing a more direct correlation between doctrinal belief can be difficult. Viewing a church -- particularly one with centuries of history behind it -- through the reductionist lens of its effects on economic thought and development is essentially meaningless. Should Catholicism be primarily identified with Dorothy Day's socialism, the development of international banking under the Templars, the Church's teaching on usury, or the invention of double-entry accounting by Brother Luca Pacioli? The New Testament's attitude ranges from the parable of the talents to the admonition that " it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." One can find interesting historical trends, like the prevalence of Jewish professionals throughout history, and there are any number of instances of religious movements who seem inseparable from their attitudes toward money. Saying that God wants you to be rich isn't going to lose authors any fans, but Western religions -- as opposed to Western religious figures -- generally avoid a fixation on secular wealth. Strictures about tithing and the occasional more spectacular contribution to God's works are usually as far as it goes among mainline religions. Which makes the Darqawiyya sect of Islam, run by Scottish-born Abdalqadir as-Sufi al-Murabit so interesting; one of the tenets of the faith is the importance of returning the Muslim world to the gold standard (in this case the dinar coin, as mentioned in the Koran). The sect is small, though fairly widely distributed, and where the Sufi tradition from which it arose is centuries old, the Darqawiyya goal of a coup de bank took a uniquely modern form. In order to crush the heretical banking system that al-Murabit identified as one of the great enemies of Islam and return the Muslim world to its rightful place, the sect invested in a revolutionary dot-com.
June 10, 2003
Of mice and men (and chicken hearts)
When Jeanne Calment died in 1997, she had outlived every single one of her contemporaries. At 122, she was the oldest living person in the world; married in 1896, she had outlived her husband 55 years and her only grandchild by 37. At 90, she had sold her apartment to a French lawyer on a contingency basis; she would receive 2,500 francs a month, and when she died, he would inherit it. She collected the money for 32 years, receiving twice what it was worth, and outlived the lawyer by a year. It will take Henrietta Lacks a while to catch up with Jeanne Calment, but she will some day. Ms. Lacks is at something of an advantage, however, having died in 1951.
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June 4, 2003
The Cold Supreme
The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed at least twenty million people. Some mutation had transformed the disease that induces a week of misery into something deadly, that killed the young and healthy even more easily than it killed children and the elderly. La Grippe ripped through American and European hospitals, already strained by the casualties of World War I. More than forty thousand American soldiers died from influenza; in comparison, fifty thousand American soldiers died in action or from wounds throughout the Great War. In Europe and in America, the dead overwhelmed funeral homes and mortuaries; in some parts of the U.S., public funerals were outlawed. When people seem to be overreacting to SARS, this sort of global, widely transmissible pandemic is what they have in mind. Compared to the Spanish flu, the common cold is as comforting as a warm bath, but it sure doesn't feel that way. As Ogden Nash wrote:
Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.
Sadly, despite ongoing research into the common cold, no credible cures have been found. Even Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and nearly beat Watson, Crick, and Franklin to the discovery of the structure of DNA, seems to have been largely speculating when he decided to investigate the effects of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) on the common cold. The chemical may lesson symptoms, but it doesn't prevent colds. Vitamin C is water soluble, however, so it doesn't linger in the body and taking huge doses doesn't seem to be bad for one, and it's less ridiculous than some cures. For myself, I'll stick to zinc tablets and that old reliable: tea laced with booze.