Dance! Come on! Come on, runt! You can dance better than that! (Photo taken by Thomas Tu)

Imagine an airplane. Good. Also imagine that a small metal shaving has lodged itself into a mechanism of the air-conditioning so that pieces of metal are fed into the spinning fans. This produces a huge pile of identically-shaped metal shavings; some fly off into the electronics bay. The size, shape and composition of the shaving is exactly so that the navigation is subtly, but precisely changed to cause the plane to veer ridiculously close to other planes. Cargo bay doors are also sabotaged, opening up and releasing a payload of metal shavings over other planes, hoping that one will lodge in the exact same place in its air-conditioning unit to start the cycle over again.   

This sounds completely ludicrous, but the complexity is on par with what rabies virus exhibits every single day in its hosts around the world. How the hell does it does this? 

A little about the virus and disease: Rabies virus (RaV) is an RNA-based virus that kinda looks like a bullet. It can theoretically grow in any warm-blooded host, but is usually confined to mammals, such as bats, dogs, cats, and also many livestock species. If you get it and do not get treatment, you will die. How you die is innately linked to how awesome RaV is, which will be outlined in the following scenario.  

So you’ve been bitten by a sheep…

So a rabid sheep has mistaken you for a blade of tasty grass and has nibbled aggressively on your little finger. RaV in the sheep’s saliva floods the wound. Immediately RaV sticks to, enters muscle cells and replicates using the cell’s machinery. Meanwhile, you’ve healed up, perhaps tucking into a nice lamb rack to get your own back. You feel none the worse for wear.   

Over the following weeks, the virus particles build up and enter the nerves around the area. RaV slowly inches up your arm (~2cm each day) via the long nerve cells, towards the spinal cord. It’s around this time that the body builds up an immune response and you start to feel general flu-like symptoms.   

Once RaV has reached the nerves or spinal cord, then you’re really in trouble. The nervous system (and the central nervous system (CNS), in particular) is what we call “immune privileged”. This means that it’s very hard to get an immune response against cells in that area. There are many reasons behind this: first, the blood-brain barrier means it’s harder for immune cells to get into the spinal cord and do their thing; also, the cells in the CNS do not “talk” to the immune system as much as other cells, so the immune system doesn’t know if the CNS is infected; and moreover, the CNS cells actively express proteins that suppress the immune system in the area. So RaV is now in a good little hiding spot and can get up to all sorts of mischief.   

As RaV replicates in nerve cells, bits of virus product clump together. These clumps alter the way the nerve cell fires off, either making the signal stronger or stopping it altogether. If we now zoom out to the patient-view, we see that you’re starting to experience pain or paralysis near the area of the bite due to altered nerve signals. As RaV works its way through the spinal cord, you get stomach cramps, violent muscular jerking, nausea, and breathing difficulties. There is now very little treatment we can give to you, the inevitably dying patient. OK, now it’s time for RaV to jump this sinking ship.   

RaV spreads to all the tissues that the nerves lead to; muscles mostly, but also (more importantly) the salivary glands. This will act as RaV’s escape hatch. But how to get to the warm tropical lands of another host?   

Some neurons in the brain are also altered, although we still don’t exactly know how. 50% of the time you get paralytic rabies, where you become completely limp. Perhaps this makes you more susceptible to attacks from predators, allowing RaV in your bodily fluids to spread that way. The other 50% of the time you get furious rabies, where you become hyper-aggressive and bite other people. This has the obvious benefit of spreading RaV to any animal (or human) you may bite in your rage.    

Apparently this isn’t enough for RaV; just to top it off, RaV will also paralyse the muscles that are responsible for swallowing, so that you don’t swallow the RaV in the saliva or dilute it out by drinking water. This produces the distinctive foaming at the mouth you see in rabies patients.   

So in summary, RaV has turned your body into its own factory and even convinced you to spread the products to other people by altering your behaviour. That’s pretty kick-ass. You know, you could have stopped all of this if you just got vaccinated with rabies. The development of the vaccine is a wonderful story on its own, which I’ll end with.   

On Louis “Kick-ass” Pasteur

(Picture taken by Thomas Tu)

Louis Pasteur, between proving germ theory, immunising against anthrax and generally being a badass scientist, thought it would be a good idea to cure rabies, seeing as it was a death sentence to anyone who got it. He worked with Emilie Roux and probably some poor forgotten lab technicians during this time.   

First, he had to get hold of some RaV. So he had his lab techs hold down a rabid dog while he sucked out some saliva from the jaws of this dog. Done. Next, he injected it into rabbits and dried out their spinal cords. There is a famous painting done of him doing this. After that, he figured that the virus was weakened enough to infect someone and have them not die while their immune system got to recognise it. He tested it on several dogs and thought that was good enough to start on little boys.   

Nine year old Joseph Meister is commemorated forever in a statue outside the Institut Pasteur. He is forever known as that kid that got mauled by a rabid dog. Despite not being a doctor and could probably face a lawsuit that would screw him over forever, Pasteur injected this kid with ground-up, rabies-infected, rabbit spine. And it worked; the boy survived. 10 years later, Pasteur died, possibly from hyper-badass-aemia. 

Joseph Meister ended up working as a caretaker for Pasteur’s tomb at the Institut Pasteur until his death. He died from an acute lead poisoning after shooting himself in the head with a revolver. He was 64.   

Outside the Institut Pasteur near where Pasteur himself is entombed (Picture taken by Thomas Tu)

- TT 

Some of Simon Schaffer’s more interesting pieces are his essay reviews, which we ought to discuss more often in this series.  The most important, though, is the confrontational “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991): 174-192, a review of The Pasteurization of France.  Schaffer discusses Latour and this piece in this video (approx. from 28:15 to 35:30):

The discussion in the video, and the one it segues into about the characteristics of science studies/history of science, provide an unusually explicit discussion about what scholarship should be like, and it’s useful to have it, because I disagree with it.  Schaffer cites Latour’s arrival with a bottle of his family’s best wine to work out their positions as a testament to Latour’s personal qualities as a scholar: Latour takes the time and effort to reconcile differences rather than engage in petty infighting.  Nevertheless, the tensions brought up in “Eighteenth Brumaire” are extremely interesting, and I view it as unfortunate that the dispute was apparently resolved socially in private, rather than intellectually in public.  (If I’m missing some crucial source, as usual please correct me in comments; to my knowledge Jan Golinski comes closest.)

Schaffer acknowledges that their positions were never fully resolved, comparing the product of the tensions between their points of view to the interference fringes produced by overlapping light sources.  He goes on to discuss how our field is highly unusual in its ability to support perspectives arising from different disciplinary backgrounds.

Yet, I tend to view the persistence of unresolved perspectives as a weakness.  It is important to note that the products of unresolved intellectual tensions can exist only in the minds of those scholars who resolve the differences between perspectives on their own.  Such individuals constitute a fairly narrow group that Chris Donohue has called a “court of understanding” (see also my discussion of “perspective layering” last February). Without an explicit and widely acknowledged resolution, the productive effects—if indeed they exist—are necessarily private, or at least excessively limited.  Audiences are divided into the elite “court” and non-elite spectators who may not even be aware that two tiers of conversation exist, mistaking a non-rigorous outline of the high-level conversation for the real thing.  (See also my take on Daston’s appraisal of the “microhistory” trend a couple months ago.)  This is an ironic outcome, since Schaffer makes a point of lauding Latour for his commitment to “honesty and rigor,” and to making work public, as through gallery exhibits.

Coming back to the piece at hand, most discussions of “Eighteenth Brumaire”  that I’ve heard take the dispute simply to be about whether or not non-humans can have “agency”, since Latour gives microbes a role to play in the rise of Louis Pasteur (see this blog’s previous discussion of Pasteurization here).  This makes it difficult to see Latour’s approach as much more than a too-clever-by-half joke compared to more sober historiography, and one’s response to Latour is thus determined by whether or not one is willing to humor Latour’s eccentricities for whatever salubrious qualities they might have (he is just another perspective to be judiciously layered).

Schaffer did indeed criticize Latour for endowing microbes with agency, but it is important to note his argument’s place within programmatic disputes between different schools of sociology, each of which view the utility of history differently.  In “Eighteenth Brumaire” Schaffer was specifically asserting the tenets of Harry Collins’ “Bath School” against Latour’s “French School” as more appropriate to historical understanding.  It is useful here to know that Collins’ sociology of calibration had played a major role in the argument in 1985’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, and Schaffer’s 1989 piece “Glass Works” was essentially a demonstration of its utility in generating new historical analysis.

The sociology of calibration is not as trivial as it sounds, because for Schaffer its “regressive” mode of analysis spoke to the crucial issue of what social means established the credibility that determined which experiments done by which experimenters with which instruments produced valid forms of knowledge, and in whose eyes.  Asking such questions, it turned out that historians could indeed find answers, and for Schaffer this was a major innovation in historiographical craft.  He took Latour’s Pasteurization to threaten this innovation.

Schaffer noted the importance of the “ideal reader” in Pasteurization: a spectator viewing the unfolding of Pasteur’s rise to prominence through the pages of certain journals without having any intellectual way of knowing whether any of the actors were in some way “right”.  By charting authorities invoked—including that of the microbes’ positive response to experiments—Latour offered a way of offering a sort of play-by-play in a language that doesn’t frame historical development in terms of the progress of, and resistance to, those we might suppose deserved to win out.

Latour, Collins, and Schaffer could all agree that the presumption of victory for those who were “right” hamstrung historical inquiry by denying that those who were “right” had to do work to see their views accepted—correctness somehow spoke for itself in such accounts.  In their view, looking forward in time to find out who won, and thus privilege the narratives of certain historical actors, was to commit an analytical heresy; call it the Whiggish heresy.

The crucial point of dispute was that Latour allowed, by granting agency to microbes, that being in some sense correct could be a valuable asset in asserting one’s position.  This position was intolerable to Schaffer, who argued (with Collins and Steven Yearley) that Latour was himself committing a specific form of Whiggish heresy called “hylozoism”, allowing nature to settle human disputes.  For Schaffer, hylozoism, like grosser forms of Whiggism, hamstrung historical inquiry by short-circuiting the need to establish why evidence was considered credible in disputes:   “Protagonists in dispute must win assent for … material technologies.  Hylozoism suggests that the microbes’ antics can explain these decisions.  Sociology of knowledge reckons that it is the combination of practices and conventions which prompt them, and these strategies get credit through culture.  Only when credibility is established will any story about the microbes make sense” (190, my emphasis).

But this misunderstands Latour’s project in two ways.  First, it misses the fact that Latour seeks a universal language of description, not a means of explanation.  Second, Latour’s descriptions are actualistic: they are play-by-play in real-time.  Latour’s actualistic descriptions do not look forward to find out what happened, but they also do not look backward to establish sufficient conditions.  Where Collins’ and Schaffer’s projects—like a philosophical account—would look backward to identify a set of conditions that establish why people, institutions, instruments, and experiments were considered credible, for Latour’s purposes it was only important that they had credibility.

For Latour, such description could grow or shrink to encompass any frame of inquiry.  A historian could expand the scope of inquiry to a multi-national account, or delve into Pasteur’s laboratory notebooks, and just chart more alliances of people, instruments, objects, and so forth.  On the other hand, for Schaffer, there was always a proper frame of inquiry: the failure to look to crucial challenges to Pasteur, especially that of the German Robert Koch, was an essential weakness in Latour’s account of the rise of Pasteur: Latour “can explain this shift in loyalty [of the Revue Scientifique] by reference to Pasteur’s experiments alone, and the good behaviour of microbes, because he deliberately omits their most potent enemies” (188, Schaffer’s emphasis).

The differences here hinge on the analyst’s sense of their own function.  For Schaffer the historian, to provide a sufficient (and thus legitimate) account of the rise of Pasteur, one had to understand how Pasteur defeated the potentially fatal challenge of Koch, which itself could only be understood by going back in time before the acceptance of Pasteur’s arguments and investigating the sources of credibility that made that acceptance possible.  Investigation through time was essential to Schaffer’s enterprise.  But for Latour, the main task was to describe or simulate the subjective experience of the contemporary spectator who had no such investigatory inclinations or resources, just as most people today experience the use of knowledge in society on a day-to-day basis.

The differences between Schaffer and Latour were programmatic, and each approach could have its own uses for the historian and sociologist alike, when used to accomplish method-appropriate tasks.  For the sake of enhancing the rigor of our work, these differences should have been fought out, articulated, and re-articulated in view of everyone.  They should not have been buried along with the hatchets in a private ceremony over a bottle of good wine.

Liberation Wellness Hour – Radio Show December 5th

Saturdays 12 noon EST on

Liberty Works Radio Network and BlogTalkRadio

H1N1 and Louis Pasteur

Certified Nutritionist, Wellness Educator and Real Food advocate Paul Ericson shares his insights about the germ theory and the devastating long term effects it has had on mankind’s health! Interesting thoughts on how the germ theory fallacy is still with us today as we face the swine flu vaccine question and wonder how did we even get to this place.

The great nutrition researcher Dr.Weston Price and his nutrition principles will also be discussed.

]]> http://lasteologias.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/el-origen-de-la-vida-en-el-pensamiento-antiguo/ Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:31:06 +0000 pauloarieu http://lasteologias.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/el-origen-de-la-vida-en-el-pensamiento-antiguo/ http://the115.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/the-daily-habit-politics-138/ Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:19:50 +0000 the115 http://the115.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/the-daily-habit-politics-138/

Sarkozy Burying Camus

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091124/wl_time/08599194239200

H1N1 and Louis Pasteur

Canadian Real Food advocate Paul Ericson shares his insights about the germ theory and the devastating long term effects it has had on mankind’s health! Interesting thoughts on how the germ theory fallacy is still with us today as we face the swine flu vaccine question and wonder how did we even get to this place. Dr.Weston Price and his nutrition principles will also be discussed.

Liberation Wellness Hour – Radio Show November 5th

Saturdays 12 noon on
Liberty Works Radio Network and BlogTalkRadio

Call in Number – 347-838-9516

[originally published in KCN, December 2000]

With the Holiday Season upon us comes its not so welcomed compadre: the “Cold and Flu Season.”  And with news reporters telling us that our nation’s drug companies are running a little low on the Traditional Flu Shots that we have come to expect, many are being forced to abandon these “shots” of artificial “immunity” for, perhaps, as some new studies are suggesting, something that will ultimately benefit them more in the long run:  bolstering their body’s immunity, naturally.

Louis Pasteur reminds us that “the microbe is nothing” and that “the soil is everything.”  In other words, if germs (microbes) were seeds, in order for them to grow and “germinate” into viable disease states, they would need fertile soil in which to do so.  The question we need to pose to ourselves is “What is the condition of our ‘soil’?”  Are you a “Disease Gardener’s Paradise”, or are you actively doing things to make your “soil” an inhospitable residence for “seeds?”

Why is it that several people can be exposed to the same “germs” and only a couple get sick, while the others remain well?  Or likewise, why is it that some people, even after taking a flu shot, still get the flu?  The answer is resistance.  Our body’s ability to resist disease or infection depends on the strength of our immune systems.

There are many things we can do to keep our immune systems humming at full power.  Drs. Schmidt, Smith, and Sehnert provide many researched ideas in their book Beyond Antibiotics:  50 (or so) Ways to Boost Immunity and Avoid Antibiotics. If this is a topic that interests you, I highly recommend you get a hold of this book.  But for those looking for a “Clif’s Note” version, I’ll attempt to highlight some of the basics.

A major player in making your “soil” impenetrable to germ seeds is good nutrition.  The World Health Organization has been quoted as saying, “The best vaccine against common infectious diseases is an adequate diet.”  Diets lacking adequate nutritional content virtually pave the way for organisms to invade the body and establish themselves.  And once sick, poor nutrition will only slow your recovery time. But as important as nutrition is in its effect on the immune system, Dr. Schmidt and his colleagues warn us not to become obsessive about it, as worrying about it may negate much of the good you’ve accomplished.  Our moods, state-of-mind, and ability to cope with stress can have a tremendous impact on our susceptibility to infectious disease.

Our ability to cope with stressors is closely linked with another immune bolstering recommendation:  getting adequate sleep.  Failure to get adequate sleep leads to fatigue, which can impair our resistance to illness and our ability to cope with stressful events.

How about another idea?  A simple, yet powerful, step you can implement into your daily routine right now is frequent washing of your hands — and especially making a point to keep your hands away from your eyes and nose, as these are easy access points of infection invasion.

There are many other very important ways to boost your natural immunity such as regular exercise, reducing refined sugar intake, avoidance of smoking and alcohol, and reduction/avoidance of various environmental toxins and pollutants.  And their book’s list of “50 (or so)” ways to boost your immunity goes on.  Get the book to delve into the details.

Of course, being that I am a chiropractor, I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the exciting frontiers we are uncovering in regards to immune function and chiropractic (something their book covers as well).

In recent years, scientists have discovered, contrary to their initial thoughts, that indeed there are connections (both direct and indirect) that interlink our nervous and immune systems.  “In fact,” as one chiropractic text states, “it is probably fair to say that nearly all immunologists now recognize some role

for the nervous system in modulating immune system function, if not a primary role.”  With that having been said, and knowing that chiropractic adjustments can have a positive effect on the nervous system (by relieving irritating spinal nerve root pressure caused by vertebrae that have lost their normal motion or position), the question as to whether chiropractic adjustments of the spine can influence the immune system to some sort of useful degree, remains.  However, several preliminary studies seem to suggest that further research endeavors in this area would definitely be worth our while.

One such study was a case report of four patients with back pain.  All four patients underwent chiropractic treatments — three improved, one did not.  Of the three that improved, the level of antibodies in their blood streams rose significantly, even when measuring 14 days after initiation of their care.  Interestingly, the patient whose back pain did not improve with chiropractic care experienced a notable drop in his antibody levels.

Another interesting case study demonstrated significant increases in B cell lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) following a regimen of chiropractic care.

But perhaps one of the most thought-provoking studies came out of the Northwestern College of Chiropractic by Patricia Brennan, Ph.D.  Her group showed that when the thoracic spine (mid-back) was adjusted, the respiratory burst cycle of polymorphonuclear neutrophils and monocytes (types of white blood cells) were enhanced.

In addition to these preliminary studies, there is a growing body of clinical evidence that also suggests a possible link between chiropractic and immune function.  Back in 1987, a leading researcher in the field of manipulative medicine, Gottfried Gutmann, M.D., reported on the examination and treatment of more than 1,000 infants and small children.  His findings revealed that many common ear, nose, throat, and bronchial disorders of childhood respond more favorably to adjustment of vertebrae than to medication.

German physician Karl Lewit, writing in a textbook of manual medicine, reported that 92% of youthful patients with chronic tonsillitis had misalignment of the first cervical vertebra and occiput (base of skull).  When these misalignments were adjusted, according to Dr. Lewit, “recurrence was absent.”

And Dr. Lewit is not alone in his findings.  Pediatrician U. Mohr reported on cases of chronic tonsillitis in which tonsillectomy was planned.  However, after treatment of “functional disturbances” of the spine via adjustments, the problems resolved and no tonsillectomies were needed.

Another worthy observation comes from a study out of the Journal of Chiropractic Research.  The study surveyed 200 pediatricians and 200 chiropractors regarding the health of their own children.  Because of their different backgrounds in training and experience, one could safely speculate that the children of chiropractors would be more apt to receive a natural-based approach to their health care (spinal adjustments, nutritional and herbal therapy, homeopathy, and acupuncture) with less emphasis on antibiotics and other drugs than the children of pediatricians.  The results of the study found that 69% of the chiropractors’ children reported “no occurrence of middle ear infection” compared to 20% of the pediatricians’ children.  “No tonsillitis” was reported in 73% of the chiropractors’ children versus 57% of the pediatricians’ children.

So what does all this mean?  Well, it’s hard to say as of yet.  More studies need to be completed before definitive conclusions can be drawn.  However, while chiropractic is definitely not a cure for infectious diseases, there is an aspect of it that appears to stimulate disease resistance — and knowing that may be all your soil needs.

___________

Addendum:  In April 2009 I wrote a similar article entitled “Licking Doorknobs”.  You can check it out by clicking here.

_____________

Sources used for this article:

Allen.  The effects of chiropractic on the immune system:  a review of the literature.  Chiropractic Journal of Australia. 23(4). 1992.

Brennan, et. al.  Enhanced phagocytic cell respiratory burst induced by spinal manipulation:  potential role of substance P.  Journal of Manipulative and Physiologic Therapeutics. 14(7):399-408. 1991.

Koren.  Childhood Vaccination:  questions all parents should ask.  Koren Publications, Philadelphia. 2000.

Leach.  The chiropractic theories:  principles and clinical applications.  Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore.  1994.

Schmidt, et. al.  Beyond antibiotics:  50 (or so) ways to boost immunity and avoid antibiotics. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, California.  1994.

van Breda, W and van Breda, J.  A Comparative Stud of the Health Status of Children Raised Under the Health Care Models of Chiropractic and Allopathic Medicine.  Journal of Chiropractic Research.   (summer: 101-3) 1989.

Merci pour vos excellents commentaires suite à la publication des deux derniers billets.  C’est la plus belle façon d’enrichir le débat autour de la grippe A(H1N1) tout en donnant du rythme à ce modeste blogue.  Comme je l’ai mentionné sur un site où les théories de complot font force de loi, il y a un élément commun qui se retrouve dans les deux camps: la compassion.  Ceux qui croient dur comme fer (et non pas comme mercure) que cette pandémie est un complot international orchestré par les Nations Unies, l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé, tous les gouvernements de la planète, les pharmaceutiques, les médias, les fonctionnaires, les politiciens, les médecins et l’ensemble du personnel hospitalier – ne veulent en réalité que votre bien.  Jugeant que le vaccin est dangereux, voire mortel, et qu’il vous transmet le virus qui vous rend malade, les conspirationnistes déploient des énergies considérables pour vous informer en espérant vous convaincre de ne pas vous faire vacciner.  Pour votre bien, malheureusement…

De l’autre côté, ceux qui défendent la vaccination font également preuve d’altruisme.  Bien que leur nombre ne soit pas aussi important, du moins sur Internet – nouvel agora de la démocratie passive – ils investissent beaucoup de temps pour ramener le débat sur le plancher de la science tout en questionnant la validité des arguments qui s’affichent actuellement sur la Toile.  Comme le mentionnait le docteur Paul Offit dans un récent article du magazine Wired, la communauté scientifique ne fait pas le poids devant les groupes de pression qui dénoncent les vaccins et les bienfaits de la pharmacologie.  Sur certains blogues et sites Internet qui nous permettent de lire les commentaires des visiteurs, on peut rapidement déceler la méfiance et l’inconfort des gens face à l’industrie pharmaceutique ainsi que la disjonction entre les citoyens et les gouvernements.  On peut les comprendre: depuis des années, nous sommes témoins d’une corruption grandissante au sein de l’appareil gouvernemental.  On se rappelle également certains dérapages de l’industrie pharmaceutique: grossières erreurs de marketing et de relations publiques, mise en marché douteuse du Vioxx, profits faramineux…  Tous les ingrédients chimiques nécessaires pour être pointé du doigt à la première occasion…  Faudrait tout de même pas jeter le bébé avec le liquide amniotique…

Il n’y a pas de mal à remettre en question l’évolution de la science, du monde médical et des produits offerts par les manufacturiers pharmaceutiques.  Il faut cependant faire preuve de discernement et d’esprit critique.  Tout cela me rappelle l’importance de l’éducation scientifique.  Mes propres enfants participent aujourd’hui au renouveau pédagogique à l’école secondaire.  Je me questionne encore si un professeur qui lit son horoscope à tous les jours y mérite un poste permanent ou si un autre qui vante les bienfaits de la réincarnation bouddhiste ne devrait tout simplement pas être relevé de ses fonctions.  Mais c’est là un tout autre débat…

En sommes-nous réellement rendus à considérer Louis Pasteur comme un imposteur?  Allons-nous célébrer le 150^ème anniversaire de la théorie de l’évolution en nous tournant vers le créationnisme? En sommes-nous arrivés à développer un intérêt pour le programme d’exploration spatiale parce que, soudainement, un clown y fait la promotion de la philanthropie?

Entrance to Semmelweis University School of Medicine, BudapestPhoto by Bruce Jancin

From Semmelweis University Medical School, Budapest

Question: What did Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis have in common with Hollywood legend Fred Zinnemann, four-time Oscar-winning director of such classics as High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man for All Seasons?

They shared a common interest in Dr. Semmelweis. Indeed, Mr. Zinnemann’s first Academy Award was for That Mothers Might Live, the 1938 Best Short Film winner devoted to the Hungarian physician.

And with flu season well underway and the populace engaging in unprecedented furious hand washing in an effort to ward off illness, now seems a good time to reflect on the life of Dr. Semmelweis (1818-1865), who is often called “the savior of mothers,” but also might legitimately be known as “the father of hand washing.”

A commemorative plaque in the main medical lecture hall at Semmelweis University in Budapest tells the story: While the school’s namesake was working in the maternity clinic at Vienna General Hospital in 1847, he had the then-revolutionary insight that it was a bad practice for interns to go straight from performing autopsies to doing pelvic exams without washing their hands. He introduced mandatory hand washing with a chlorinated lime solution, and mortality from puerperal fever was drastically reduced.

This was the prebacteriologic era, however, and the Viennese medical establishment took umbrage at the notion that physicians could transmit disease via their gentlemanly hands. Dr. Semmelweis’ publications on antisepsis were greeted with reactions ranging from indifference to ridicule. He was eventually dismissed from the hospital and hounded back to his native Budapest. There, as the plaque relates, he “began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers.”

His medical colleagues and family believed he was losing his mind, a distinct possibility given that tertiary syphilis was an occupational hazard of medical practice in public hospital maternity wards in that pre-glove era. Under the ruse of a request that he inspect a new hospital ward, Dr. Semmelweis was tricked into involuntary commitment to a Vienna mental hospital. There, he died just 14 days later, “possibly after being severely beaten by guards,” according to the university plaque.

His reputation was rehabilitated only years later, when Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease provided a mechanistic explanation for the striking clinical success of Dr. Semmelweis’ hand-washing program.

—Bruce Jancin

Louis Pasteur once said, “chance favors the prepared mind.” That’s the genius behind all these accidental inventions – the scientists were prepared.

They did their science on the brink and were able to see the magic in a mistake, set-back, or coincidence. (Check out number 10)

Source:
http://science.discovery.com/brink/top-ten/accidental-inventions/inventions.html

In discussing experiments, it must be mentioned that frequently experiments are improved upon after they’re finished.  Ideally, you would be able to foresee all problems with an experiment before you begin, but that’s not always the case.  Sometimes you think you’ve done something wonder and had the results published, only to find out later that someone else sees a flaw in your work.  Maybe someone else continues your work and publishes their findings.  Let’s look at a case that is rooted in Biology’s history: spontaneous generation.  For centuries, people have realized the correlation between sex and reproduction in humans.  But some living things were thought to come to life on their own–to spontaneously generate.  In other, living organisms came to life from nonliving matter.

In 1668, an Italian physician named Francesco Redi came up with a hypothesis to disprove the idea of spontaneous generation–specifically, the thought that maggots could come to life from meat.  Redi observed that after meat sat out, flies would be attracted to it, and a few days after that maggots would appear.  Redi thought that maggots were from fly eggs too small to be seen.  Redi set up an experiment–with the control and variable groups–to prove his hypothesis that flies produce maggots.  In the experiment, the control group was a piece of meat in an uncovered jar.  The variable group was a piece of meat in a jar covered with gauze; the gauze allowed air through, but not the flies.  After a few days, Redi observed that the control group had maggots on the meat and the variable group didn’t. He then concluded that maggots only form when flies come in contact with meat and that spontaneous generation is not at play.

In the 1700s, an English scientist proposed that spontaneous generation was possible and performed an entirely different experiment that he suggested proved it.  Later, another Italian scientist, improved on that experiment and concluded that Redi was indeed correct the first time.  So for almost 200 years after Redi, there was still much debate as to whether or not spontaneous generation could happen.

Until there was Pasteur.  Louis Pasteur, in 1864, settled the argument once and for all.  Taking the basic idea of the two scientists from the 1700s and answering critics that said air was necessary for life, Pasteur developed a special flask.  It had a curved neck that allowed air in, but would trap any microorganisms and not let them contaminate his findings.

Click for full image

Pasteur showed that his flask was free from microorganisms, even though it was open to the air.  For a year, there was no microbial growth. Until Pasteur broke the neck of the flask.  And when microorganisms appeared, he proved to the world that life could only come from other life.  Because of his findings in this and many other experiments throughout his life, Louis Pasteur is considered one of the greatest Biologists in history.

Louis Pasteur said that “chance favors the prepared mind.” To which I have always suggested that we go get prepared in case we might get lucky. I was talking to a high school friend this weekend who happens to have invented and patented the “on screen” television guides that have become ubiquitous. I asked him where that idea came from, and this is what he shared.

In the early 1980s he was watching cartoons with his son and they wondered what was on next. He reached over to look at the TV Guide and managed to spill the orange juice he had on his lap for his son. This frustration apparently triggered the “why can’t the guide be on the TV screen” idea. He came up with a way to do this, but at the time, the memory required to support the application would have cost about $500,000 per user. Not economically viable. His wife suggested that the cost of memory was dropping daily and by the time he finished perfecting how to do it, it might be economically viable.

She was a little off on her timing, but within 9 years it became viable, and as we all know, now it’s everywhere. Spilled orange juice, an open mind and a smart wife combined to create an innovation, which became a company.

Get prepared, you never know when the “chance” will arrive.

Mitch

Our government is filled with politicians who campaigned on a platform of protecting our right to choose.  To date none of them has done anything to protect any of our rights; instead they chip away at the Constitution with each new bill, comittiee and Czar.  In most states citizens can only purchase the dairy products the government wants them to consume – they actually legislate what kind of milk and cheese voters can buy.

Sure Louis Pasteur did mankind a favor when he discovered the process that now bares his name but other innovations since 1864 have negated the need to pasteurize milk.  Raw milk does not present the same dangers it did two centuries ago.  So why is it that in most states it is illegal to purchase raw milks and the amazing cheeses made from them?  Shouldn’t that be my choice?

The inept USDA is pasteurization crazy.  Do you know that commercial honey is pasteurized?  Honey, which in its raw state is as inhospitable an enviroment for microorganisms as exists on the planet is being cooked.  So what does pasteurizing honey do?  Nothing positive.  In fact it strips honey of every bit of its considerable nutritional value as well as flavor.

My good friend Widmer once smuggled back a pound of raw cheese from Zürich.  You could smell it a block away and the flavor was unbelievable.  It was the Swissest Swiss I have ever tasted.  When I inquired what made it so good he said back home they don’t pasteurize their milk.

I’m not saying to stop pasteurizing milk.  There are plenty of folks out there who just feel better with it.  What I am saying is give me back the freedom of choice granted by the founding fathers (who, by the way, never drank pasteurized milk).  Give me back my raw dairy.

I wrote previously about parts 1 & 2 of Adam Rutherford’s The Cell. I just watched part 3 (the final part) and the confusion continues.

The main point of this episode was to tell us how life first started on Earth through spontaneous generation. As I noted before, this seemed rather odd since the first episode told how Louis Pasteur showed the idea to be ridiculous. Basically, scientists have changed the rules since Pasteur’s time (note: I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to do this, if there’s good reason).

Louis showed that organisms did not form spontaneously in his mixture of useful chemicals.

These days, scientists just have to show that certain chemicals that are important parts of living organisms can form in the right conditions. Rutherford kept talking about what early Earth was like, but as far as I can see, the only reason people believe Earth was ever like that is because it needed to be for life to have the slightest chance of starting spontaneously. He gave a few examples of experiments producing important chemicals, but never tried to explain how they could have come together in exactly the right way to form the first living cell. If I remember rightly, there were 161 different structures, all immensely complicated, necessary for life.

It was admitted that this sort of science is actually just intelligent guesswork. “We can’t go back there so we have to come up with reasonable sounding ideas.” This really puts it into perspective. Even if life could have started like they suggest, that doesn’t mean it did.

A few statements made in the show:

All cells come from other cells. Over the three episodes the Doc repeatedly emphasised this as a basic bedrock fact of science. I don’t have any problem accepting this. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for spotaneous generation though.

All organisms on Earth came from one cell at the beginning. Hang on, assuming for a second that spontaneous generation could have happened, why did it only happen once? If the right conditions were present, why didn’t it happen repeatedly?

DNA makes RNA makes proteins. A scientific “dogma”. Interesting. People who have tried to explain spontaneous generation to me before have suggested that DNA evolved from RNA, from proteins, from amino acids.

Parts of this animation were used in the show:

I know it’s only a computer animation, but presumably it is based on reality, and I think it’s awesome. Personally, it puts me in awe of the designer of this incredible machine. I’m all in favour of studying it more and more deeply, but don’t try and explain how it evolved from nothing all by itself, you just sound bonkers.

Astro-biology. Seriously? Us theists are always told we’re just pushing the question of why there’s something rather than nothing further back, by suggesting God created matter. To be fair, Rutherford didn’t just suggest that “life came to Earth from space”, he spoke to someone who found some important molecule on a meteorite.

Thankfully the whole hour wasn’t spent speculating on how life might have started on Earth, he also looked a bit at where genetic engineering could go in the future. I found this bit really interesting, and some of the possibiblities are really exciting, but there are some questions about where lines should be drawn. I think I’m less against playing around with this stuff than some Christians, but there are points where playing God could go too far. Producing a synthetic organism to kill cancer would obviously have great benefits, but I can see some scientist in the future trying to mess with the human genes themselves, probably not to make a glow-in-the-dark person, but there could be all sorts of problems. The concept of designer babies isn’t exactly brand new, but if it means selecting an embryo with the right properties and destroying the others then (like abortion) it’s definitely wrong.

I just watched The Hidden Kingdom and The Chemistry of Life, parts 1 & 2 of 3 part series The Cell.

It looks like these are only available to watch til the 2nd September.

There was a lot of good stuff in them.

Louis Pasteur is a legend, he showed that life does not generate spontaneously from non-living matter, whether we’re talking making mice by mixing wheat and sweat, or simple bacteria forming in an environment that would suit them, it just doesn’t happen. The presenter made it sound properly ridiculous and mocked the scientists who held onto the medieval belief for so long.

Yet atheists today still hold onto this medieval belief to explain how the first living cells arose from non-living matter.

But funny things start to happen in part 2, the fact that injecting a mouse’s eye DNA into fruit fly embryos produces extra eyes shows that, despite the eyes themselves having very different structures, the two creatures are made up of very similar genes. He claimed this was evidence of evolution from a common ancestor, but surely that’s going too far? I would think it’s evidence of a designer using basically the same materials to make all living beings.

I will have to wait ’til Wednesday to see part 3, but it looks like he’s going to explain how the first life could have spontaneously generated. This seems odd to me after he so emphatically mocked the idea in episode 1, so I await with interest.

More of my favourite motivational quotations:

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

- Marcel Proust

In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind

- Louis Pasteur

In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists

- Eric Hoffer

Links

• Don’t Wait For Your Ship To Come In. . . Swim Out To Meet It
• That’s Just The Way I Am! (& Problem Solving)
• The Viewing Influences the Doing

Just for clarification, I can’t stand the L.A. Times, but I’m thankful that they printed these words acknowledging the inherent weirdness of the new Michael Phelps Subway ads, because frankly they’re not that weird and I can’t be that bothered.

::fahrphrrrssssst::

Mostly I just wanted an excuse to make this image.

this is not COD Magazine synchronicity.

Bíblia e Ciência.

La fortuna favorece a la mente preparada.

(Louis Pasteur)

La imagen Salida de la Luna, Cadí es también un homenaje a otra de las imágenes clásicas de Ansel Adams.

"Moonrise, Hernández" - Fotografía: Ansel Adams, Hernández, Nuevo México, 1941

Referencias:

• Adams, Ansel, The Negative, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, The New Ansel Adams Photography Series / Book 2, 12ª impresión, 1992, ISBN: 0-8212-1131-5.

Para el anecdotario de esta foto se puede consultar este enlace con los recuerdos de Michael Adams (hijo de Ansel) y comentarios de Alan Ross y John Sexton (ayudantes de Ansel Adams en distintos momentos).

No discussion of historiography and the Great Escape from the philosophy of science can long exclude Bruno Latour, though it is important to remember that Latour urges: “I cannot claim [the honor] of being a historian….  I use history as a brain scientist uses a rat, cutting through it in order to follow the mechanisms that may allow me to understand at once the content of a science and its context” (Pasteurization of France, p. 12).

In a move typical of the Great Escape, though, Latour relies on historiographical coherence to deny philosophy its place.  It is significant that Latour begins his work The Pasteurization of France (1988, a translation and revision of 1984’s Les Microbes: Guerre et Paix) by drawing a parallel with Tolstoy’s historical debunking of the Napoleonic Wars as playing out according to the design of genius military architects.  History, in all its contingency, can know no architecture, despite those who would impose one retrospectively: “Even if few people still believe in the naive view, courageously defended by epistemologists, that sets science apart from noise and disorder, others would still like to provide a rational version of scientific strategy, to offer clear-cut explanations of how it develops and why it works” (p. 6).

Latour’s main concern after Laboratory Life (1979, with Steven Woolgar) is not the production of knowledge and the practice of scientists, but the way knowledge works in society.  With other sociologists of the 1970s and 1980s, Latour would emphasize the importance of trust over epistemology: since very few people witness experiments and very few people bother to verify their conceptual presuppositions (the famous “black boxes”), and since very few people understand scientific arguments in all their detail, scientists and laypeople alike tend to take the claims of trusted authorities for granted without an epistmeologically valid reason for doing so.  Rationality is built on the foundations of ritual, therefore an important topic of investigation is the creation, maintenance, and challenging of networks of trust.

Latour’s world is fundamentally a fight for survival: alliances are forged and broken, opponents are battled, practices spread and are discontinued.  Evidence does not convince others on its own: the way must be prepared, and those intent on denying it can do so successfully if they have enough allies.  History is always the judge: there is no abstract scorecard of knowledge gained for human kind.   “E pur si muove” may be a noble sentiment, but it’s pretty weak stuff for Latour.  The planets, the Medicis, and some astronomers were not good enough allies to keep Galileo out of house arrest.

In Pasteurization, the most basic point Latour scores is to deny that Pasteur’s work was the source of its own authority and consequences, much as Kutuzov’s genius had little to do with the defeat of Napoleon’s armies.  Latour’s real target, though, is to reform the language of knowledge and society.  If few people ever even see a microbe, then public evidence for them becomes the authorities or “spokesmen” who testify to the link between microbes and their actions (such as making people ill).  Therefore, to deny, affirm, or modify the link between microbes and disease is to deny, affirm, or limit the credibility of their spokesmen.  Because nature and its spokesmen stand and fall together, there can be no practical distinction between the natural and the social.

It is here where we find that Latour squares off against more than the vile epistemologists; he is also after those who seek historical explanations for the development of science and public knowledge in the purely social—the plaything of “groups, classes, interests, and laws” (p. 35).  He also found the the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) “disappointing”.  He viewed it as concentrating too hard on the generation of knowledge in the mind of the individual: “Most of the sociology of science is internalist epistemology sandwiched between two slices of externalist sociology” (p. 257n27).  Once again, the divides in science studies are marked by who can distance themselves from philosophy the fastest.

Latour’s main strategy, as I read it, is to replace explanation with description of the co-production of knowledge and authority, turning to semiotics—the analysis of the textual content of arguments—to do so.  In Pasteurization he looks at the content of three journals to see the way French scientific hero Louis Pasteur became associated in print with the reason he became a hero: the improvement of public health.  Importantly for Latour, the history of the hygiene movement is not dependent on the history of knowledge of microbes.  Pasteur’s work lent the hygiene movement intellectual authority and focus in its advocacy, while the hygiene movement lent Pasteur a calling card of the validity of his work, and thus prestige and support.  Not many people in this story actually had contact with the microbes themselves, though.  Rather, hygiene, laboratory work, personalities, and public health all reinforced each others’ position against possible opponents.

Nevertheless, the microbes were important, and his granting any “agency” to them generated a lot of criticism, mainly because they seemed to grant historical explanatory power to “evidence” and not enough to the human factors that made that evidence credible in the first place—it was Latour who was getting too epistemological.  For his part, Latour insisted that he gave natural things agency only in a “semiotic sense” (p. 35), which I take to mean that he is merely invoking a description of when some “spokesman” starts invoking a natural object in their arguments.  If Pasteur said he was convinced by the microbes, then they convinced him; if hygiene proponents said that hygiene was responsible for killing microbes and thereby improving public health, then it was—all insofar as others were persuaded to believe the claim and continued to do so.

That non-human agents might well have been involved is a proposition needed to maintain semiotic credulity.  They preserve historical coherence: “In order to act effectively between men—that is, to go to Mecca, to survive in the Congo, to bring fine, healthy children to birth, to get manly regiments—we have to ‘make room’ for microbes” (p. 36).  But they also keep description from descending into relentless cynicism, with every claim to have seen reality being grounded in some distinctly social agenda: “To make up society with only social connections, omitting the invisibles, is to end up with general corruption, a perverse deviation of good human intentions” (ibid).

For historians, I would argue, Latour’s strait-jacketed semiotic descriptions are most useful as an assay of explanatory plausibility.  For Latour, semiotic shifts indicate shifts in alliances.  We know the text is real, and the text serves as a descriptive phenomenology of “what happened”, but—just as if we were observers (in Latour’s original, “ideal readers”) following the events in real time (remember, Latour is not a historian)—we will not be able to distinguish what was “natural” from what was “social”.

Historians, though, are in a position to at least speculate and argue about “what happened” even at the level of “cognition” and “persuasion”, using further evidence (remember, Latour is only studying journal contents), as well as epistemology to try and intuit what actors saw and what “made sense” to them.  Latour’s phenomenology of alliances and battles can only discover evidence that cognition has occurred: Pasteur links microbes to disease; hygiene advocates use Pasteur’s work to make their recommendations more specific.  It is by studying the extent of these semiotic alliances of terms and authorities that we can define constituencies of belief and practice, which helps historians sharpen their historical explanations of the persuasive means by which constituencies were constructed, which is where Latour doesn’t venture—the construction of constituencies for him is made possible when resistances are overcome, but their generation remains a fact rather than something to be explained.

I tend to think Latour paid too high a price for historical coherence of description, which I do think he achieves.  By denying epistemology, he can’t generate satisfying historical explanations, but by forsaking deeply local practice to maintain chronological coherence, he denies himself the analytical benefits (such as the sociological analysis of anomaly resolution) of a more purely sociological approach favored by scholars such as Collins.  Finally, his (idiosyncratic and off-putting) formulations are hardly necessary for the production of coherent history—they are only one method of challenging a particular breed of naive view of the historical development of science and its relationship with society.

“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” – Louis Pasteur

Ah, how I wish I could say the same. Alas, I cannot. I am someone whose strength does not lie in their tenacity. I am someone whose strength lies in my laziness. I do not excel at working hard. I excel at finding ways to avoid working hard. In fact, looking back on my life, what has determined most of the choices I’ve made has been my lack of interest in endeavoring and completing anything remotely taxing (with minor exceptions). I chose to focus on art in high school because it was easy and didn’t involve a lot of homework. I am now getting a degree in fine art and classical studies, which, when you think about it practicality-wise, is probably the most useless degree you can get. The only thing I’ll probably be able to do with this is stay in school for another 8 years or so and then teach other people useless information, and write papers. Uselessness and writing are both fun and intriguing in my world.

If uselessness and writing were a venn diagram, blogging would be somewhere in the middle. One writes, and one technically isn’t really doing anything. This is right up my alley. Maybe there are bloggers that aren’t useless. I am not sure. All I know is, I am definitely not one of them. I am going to write about nothing that really matters because I am a very bored and self-involved sort of person. I will probably waste a lot of time writing about things I do that waste time. One time, I spent hours bouncing a styrofoam ball on a badminton raquet, seeing how many times I could hit it before it fell. My maximum was 1024 times. Oh, the fun. I know there were probably a lot of other productive things I could have done with this time, but I didn’t do them. Simple as that. 

So, if you’re at all the sort of person that enjoys doing useless things, writing useless things, and being a non-productive member of society in general, I hope you get some enjoyment out of this. If you are a useful, successful, productive individual and you are still reading this, then, welcome to the dark side.

cheers. anni.