Books – Page 162 – artdiamondblog.com

The Palace of Discovery: “They Came for Wonder and Hope”

The Palace of Discovery (aka Palais de la Decouverte) in Paris. Source of photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paris2e/2524827592/

Near the beginning of World War II, the 1937 Palace of Discovery in Paris, was a popular source of hope for the future:

(p. 206) An unexpectedly popular draw at the exposition was a relatively small hall hidden away behind the Grand Palais. The Palace of Discovery, as it was called, attracted more than 2 million visitors, five times the number that visited the modern art exhibit. They came for wonder and hope. The wonder was provided by exhibits including a huge electrostatic generator, like something from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, two enormous metal spheres thirteen feet apart, across which a 5-million-volt current threw a hissing, crackling bolt of electricity. The hope came from the very nature of science itself. Designed by a group of liberal French researchers, the Palace of Discovery was intended to be more a “people’s university” than a stuffy museum, a place to hear inspiring lectures on the latest wonders of science, messages abut technological confidence and progress for the peoples of the world.

Source:
Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

Inability to Patent Sulfa, Delayed Its Marketing

When new uses of old, unpatentable drugs are discovered, there seems to be inadequate incentive to publicize them, and bring them to market. (For example, I think I have seen research suggesting that aspirin and fish oil capsules, are as effective in fighting heart disease as some newer drugs, but are nonoptimally utilized because of perverse incentives.) Maybe a revision of the patent law should be considered that permits some patenting of new uses of old drugs and substances?

(p. 172) It was wonderful that this powerful, inexpensive medicine was now available, but for a year after the Pasteur Institute announcement, no one marketed it seriously in its pure form as a medicine. Because it was not patentable, it was difficult for major chemical or drug firms to see a way to make much of a profit from it. It was not until months after the Pasteur group’s first publication on sulfa that the president of Rhône-Poulenc, an industrial supporter of Fourneau’s laboratory, visited the Pasteur Institute to hear about it. After talking with the researchers he decided to launch Septazine, a variation on pure sulfa that he felt was different enough to allow patenting—and hence profits. Septazine reached the marketplace in May 1936.

French Entrepreneur Fourneau Was Against Law, But Used It

The existence and details of patent laws can matter for creating incentives for invention and innovation. The patent laws in Germany and France in the 1930s reduced the incentives for inventing new drugs.

(p. 141) German chemical patents were often small masterpieces of mumbo jumbo. It was a market necessity. Patents in Germany were issued to protect processes used to make a new chemical, not, as in America, the new chemical itself; German law protected the means, not the end. . . .
. . .
(p. 166) Fourneau decided that if the French were going to compete, the nation’s scientists would either have to discover their own new drugs and get them into production before the Germans could or find ways to make French versions of German compounds before the Germans had earned back their research and production costs—in other words, get French versions of new German drugs into the market before the Germans could lower their prices. French patent laws, like those in Germany, did not protect the final product. “I was always against the French law and I thought it was shocking that one could not patent one’s invention,” Fourneau said, “but the law was what it was, and there was no reasons not to use it.”

In Geology, Economic Growth Caused Scientific Progress

(p. 130) . . . , the major problem inhibiting England’s industrial development was the state of the roads. So the introduction of waterborne transportation on the new canals triggered massive economic expansion because these waterways transported coal (and other raw materials) much faster and cheaper than by packhorse or wagon. In 1793 a surveyor called William Smith was taking the first measurements in preparation for a canal that was to be built in the English county of Somerset, when he noticed something odd. (p. 131) Certain types of rock seemed to lie in levels that reappeared, from time to time, as the rock layer dipped below the surface and then re-emerged across a stretch of countryside. During a journey to the north of England (to collect more information about canal-construction techniques), Smith saw this phenomenon happening everywhere. There were obviously regular layers of rock beneath the surface which were revealed as strata where a cliff face of a valley cut into them. In 1796 Smith discovered that the same strata always had the same fossils embedded in them. In 1815, after ten years of work, he compiled all that he had learned about stratification in the first proper colored geological map, showing twenty-one sedimentary layers. Smith’s map galvanized the world of fossil-hunting.

Source:
Burke, James. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible – and Other Journeys. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Christian Care “Replaced Roman Hygiene with Frequent Prayers and Infrequent Baths”

Hager discusses the medical practices of Paris’ Hôtel Dieu lying-in maternity hospital in the 17th century, that led to widespread, and often fatal, childbed fever:

(p. 114) Every day the senior doctors would arrive on their rounds followed closely by a gaggle of students. They would pull the women’s covers down, pass hands over their abdomens, point, prod, and discuss. Although the physicians’ wigs were carefully powdered, their hands were generally unwashed. Christian care, which emphasized purity of the soul over that of the body, had replaced Roman hygiene with frequent prayers and infrequent baths. In Paris the privies and slaughterhouses (as well as the hospital wards of the Hôtel Dieu) dumped their waste into the Seine, then drew drinking and washing water from the same source. Bedding was washed infrequently. Lice and fleas abounded.

Industrialist Duisberg Made Domagk’s Sulfa Discovery Possible

(p. 65) . . . Domagk’s future would be determined not only by his desire to stop disease but also by his own ambition, his family needs, and the plans of a small group of businessmen he had never met. He probably had heard of their leader, however, one of the preeminent figures in German business, a man the London Times would later eulogize as “the greatest industrialist the world has yet had.” His name was Carl Duisberg.

Duisberg was a German version of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller rolled into one. He had built an empire of science in Germany, leveraging the discoveries of dozens of chemists he employed into one of the most profitable businesses on earth. He knew how industrial science worked: He was himself a chemist. At least he had been long ago. Now, in the mid-1920s, in the twilight of his years, his fortunes made, his reputation assured, he often walked in his private park alone—still solidly built, with his shaved head and a bristling white mustache, still a commanding presence in his top hat and black overcoat—through acres of forest, fountains, classical statuary, around the pond in his full-scale Japanese garden by the lacquered teahouse, over his steams, and across his lawns.

How to Run a Business in Nebraska

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ book review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) How exactly did Jack get to be so wild? It appears — and even the redoubtable Mr. Rottenberg acknowledges that the documentation is often sparse — that Jack got into the freight-hauling business and one thing led to another, including stage coaching, supervising the mails and helping to run the Pony Express. In his heyday, Slade was the boss of the Express’s fabled Sweetwater division, said to be the most dangerous stretch of the overland route, from Nebraska to Salt Lake City, 500 hard miles of hard country, hard men, hard weather and unfriendly Indians. One chronicler noted about Slade that “from Fort Kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the Almighty.”

Freight hauling was not the space program. A man could get into this line of work easily if he had the physical stamina and the nerve. But it was dangerous work. A man might run into some rough customers. Perhaps the most celebrated of these, in Slade’s case, was an ornery French-Canadian named Jules Beni, with whom he had a long-standing feud. Jules eventually shot Slade, in 1860, riddling him with bullets and leaving him for dead. But Slade was made of tougher stuff and would settle the score. A year later he killed Beni and carried the dead man’s ears around as a souvenir, pulling them out for display from time to time to the alarm of fellow saloon patrons. A previous account of Slade’s life was in fact titled “An Ear in His Pocket.” Now that’s a bad man!

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT. “BOOKShelf; A Desperado Rides Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., NOVEMBER 11, 2008): A15.

Reference to the book being reviewed:
Rottenberg, Dan. Death of a Gunfighter. Westholme Publishing, 2008.

A True Christmas Story of Hope and Justice

Gerhard Domagk. Source of photo: http://www.nndb.com/people/744/000128360/

Gerhard Domagk spent most of his adult life in a focused, tireless effort to find the first cure for a bacterial infection. Finally, his laboratory discovered a sulfa drug they called “Prontosil,” that seemed effective against strep and some other infections. Domagk published his first preliminary results on the drug in February 1935 (see Hager, p. 164). An increasing number of doctors began testing the drug on their desperate patients.
Life is not always unfair:

(p. 181) In early December 1935, just after the French published the discovery that pure sulfa was the active ingredient in Prontosil, Domagk’s six-year-old daughter, Hildegarde, suffered a bad accident. She was making a Christmas decoration in their house when she decided that she needed help threading a needle. She was on her way downstairs to find her mother, carrying the needle and thread, when she fell. The needle was driven into her hand blunt end first, breaking off against a carpal bone. She was taken to the local clinic and the needle was surgically removed, but a few days later, her hand started swelling. After the stitches were removed, her temperature rose and kept rising. An abscess formed at the surgical site. She had a wound infection. The staff at the clinic tried opening and draining the abscess. When it became reinfected, they opened it again. Then again. The infection started moving up her arm. “Her general state and the abscess worsened to such a point that we became seriously concerned,” Domagk wrote later. “More surgery was impossible.” She was falling in and out of consciousness. The surgeons were talking about amputating her arm. Once the blood tests showed that the invading germ was strep, Domagk went to his laboratory and pocketed a supply of Prontosil tablets, returned to her hospital room, put the red tablets in her mouth himself, and made certain that she swallowed. Then he waited. A day later her temperature continued to rise. He gave her more tablets. No improvement. On day (p. 182) three he gave her more, a large dose, but there was still no improvement. Her situation was growing desperate, so he pulled out all the stops, on day four giving her more Prontosil tablets, then two large injections of Prontosil soluble. Finally her temperature started to drop. He gave her more tablets. After a week of treatment, her temperature finally returned to normal. The infection had been stopped. By Christmas she was able to celebrate the holidays with her family.

Most Scientists’ Lives Are “Like Those of Anxious Middle Managers”

(p. 64) The truth is that scientists come in all types, just like everyone else. They are people, not pop paradigms. They worry about how they are going to pay their bills, and they get envious of the researchers who got the credit they should have gotten. They compete for grants and complain when those grants are awarded to someone else. They focus on prestige and work for advancement and usually do what their bosses (or, less directly, granting agencies) say. Most scientists, as the great British molecular biologist J. D. Bernal noted back in the 1930s, live lives more like those of anxious middle managers than great visionaries.

Resilience is Key to Surviving Disasters (and to Successful Entrepreneurship)

I believe that resilience is a key characteristic of successful entrepreneurs. Amanda Ripley has some plausible and useful comments on resilience in the passages quoted below.

(p. 91) Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster. Dangers seem more manageable to these people, and they perform better as a result. . . .

. . . A healthy, proactive worldview should logically lead to resilience. But it’s the kind of unsatisfying answer that begs another question. If this worldview leads to resilience, well what leads to the worldview?

(p. 92) The answer is not what we might expect. Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear. A few recent studies have found that people who are unrealistically confident tend to fare spectacularly well in disasters. Psychologists call these people “self-enhancers,” but you and I would probably call them arrogant. These are people who think more highly of themselves than other people think of them. They tend to come off as annoying and self-absorbed. In a way, they might be better adapted to crises than they are to real life.

Source:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.
(Note: ellipses added.)

James Burke (and Art Diamond) on the Importance of Serendipity

Source of book image: http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/_images/ISBNCovers/Covers_Enlarged/9780316116107_388X586.jpg

Like other James Burke books, The Pinball Effect is a good source of interesting and thought-provoking stories and examples, usually related to science and technology. One of his themes in the book is the importance of serendipity in making unanticipated connections.

My (and not Burkes’) musings on serendipity:

Serendipity might be an example of Hayek’s local knowledge, that the free market encourages the entrepreneur to take advantage of. Serendipity is an occurrence of one person in a particular time and place, with a mind prepared to be alert for it. As such it could not be planned by a central authority, and would usually be vetoed by a committee decision process. To maximally benefit from serendipity, we need a system that allows the motivated individual to pursue their discoveries.

Burke’s musings on serendipity:

(p. 3) In every case, the journeys presented here follow unexpected paths, because that’s how life happens. We strike out on a course only to find it altered by the action of another person, somewhere else in time and space. As a result, the world in which we live today is the end-product of millions of these kinds of serendipitous interactions, happening over thousands of years.

Source:
Burke, James. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible – and Other Journeys. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997.