Category: Books

Some Venture Capitalists “Act as Mentors,” Some Install Seasoned Veterans as C.E.O.s, and Some Are “Founder-Friendly,” Allowing Genius “to Do Its Work”

(p. C4) . . . Mallaby never quite settles on the story he wants to tell. He introduces the book by laying out what he intends to do: “to explain the venture-capital mind-set” and “to evaluate venture capital’s social impact.” This mind-set, he says, revolves around the “power law” of his title — the idea that the distribution of phenomena is not “normal” but skewed. Instead of a bell curve, picture a long tail, where “winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate.” Adapt or die, sink or swim — there’s no middle ground. This is why V.C.s like to talk about “grand slams” and “moon shots”; Peter Thiel says that a fund’s top investment should generate returns so spectacular that it will outperform everything else in the fund put together.

This, clearly, isn’t the kind of logic that has much use for steady, incremental growth, to say nothing of a flourishing middle class. You might therefore wonder about the “social impact” of venture capital, which Mallaby deems to be, on the whole, good. He concedes that “V.C.s as individuals can stumble sideways into lucky fortunes,” or can sometimes do unhelpful things. But he is ultimately bullish on what they have to offer: “Venture capital as a system is a formidable engine of progress — more so than is frequently acknowledged.” That engine, Mallaby reminds us, has funded such ventures as the development of synthetic insulin and, more recently, plant-based alternatives to ecologically damaging meat.

. . .

He gives examples of the different kinds of funds, with their various personalities and philosophies. There are V.C.s who see it as their role to act as mentors and coaches to inexperienced founders. There are V.C.s who insist on installing seasoned outsiders at start-ups to serve as C.E.O.s. There are also “founder-friendly” V.C.s, who promise to be hands-off, allowing genius, no matter how unorthodox or weird, to do its work.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Funder-Friendly Look at Venture Capital.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 1, 2022): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 31, 2022, and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; ‘The Power Law’ Is a Funder-Friendly Look at the World of Venture Capital.”)

The book under review is:

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

Venture Capital’s “Massive” Role in Funding Innovation

(p. A15) The average venture-capital fund launched in 2011 outperformed the S&P 500 by 7% per year. But that statistic understates the astronomical returns earned by a few top performers—and the mediocre returns earned by the rest. Between 1979 and 2018, the median fund underperformed the S&P 500, while the top 5% of funds nearly tripled the index’s performance.

The investor Bill Gurley, of Benchmark, describes venture capital as a “grand-slam business.” In “The Power Law,” business journalist Sebastian Mallaby argues that venture is defined by its most extravagant successes. A few deals explain the majority of returns, a few funds drive the majority of asset-class performance, a few wild ideas change the world.

Venture’s contribution to innovation and entrepreneurship is massive. Mr. Mallaby notes that between 1995 and 2019 venture-backed companies accounted for nearly half of U.S. nonfinancial IPOs. These firms are orders of magnitude more likely to launch an IPO than startups that don’t receive venture backing. The U.S. economy’s dynamism depends in large part on the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

. . .

Though the book focuses on the winners, Mr. Mallaby doesn’t shy away from criticism, especially in his description of the decline of Kleiner Perkins. The firm was successful in the 1990s, but lead partner John Doerr became more interested in virtue signaling than in profit making. He started a cleantech fund, based on a conversation with his teenage daughter about saving the planet, that put a significant dent in the firm’s long-term track record. And he embarked on a highly publicized gender-equity campaign to hire female partners, only to see some of the most talented women quit and then see the firm be sued by a disgruntled employee for gender discrimination.

. . .

In his closing words in “The Power Law,” Mr. Mallaby warns that it’s “unwise” to bet against venture. But public markets have recently turned against IPOs and other venture-backed companies, sending venture-style portfolios like Cathie Wood’s ETF into steep losses. With the IPO window closing and tech stocks selling off, some venture investors might well be thinking: “There but by the grace of God go I.”

For the full review, see:

Daniel Rasmussen. “BOOKSHELF; Chasing Unicorns.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, February 3, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 2, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Power Law’ Review: Chasing Unicorns.”)

The book under review is:

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

The Elite Experts Who Have Failed, Tend to Censor the Heterodox Outsiders Who They Fear

(p. 8) When you have a chronic illness and struggle to get better, you try to maintain a certain equilibrium by distinguishing yourself from all those other sick people, the ones who are trying truly crazy things while you are proceeding sensibly and moderately along the path to health.

. . .

These exotic treatments, from acupuncture to IV vitamin C to magnet therapy and more, weren’t the core of what helped me eventually gain ground and improve — strong and various doses of antibiotics played the central role. But they were the most educational part of my slow, still-continuing recovery, in the sense of what they revealed about the complexity and strangeness of the world.

The strangest of them all was the Rife machine.

. . .

Naturally, it worked.

What does “worked” mean, you may reasonably ask? Just this: By this point in my treatment, there was a familiar feeling whenever I was symptomatic and took a strong dose of antibiotics — a temporary flare of pain and discomfort, a desire to move or rub the symptomatic areas of my body, a sweating or itching feeling, followed by a wave of exhaustion and then a mild relief. I didn’t get this kind of reaction with every alternative treatment I tried. But with the Rife machine I got it instantly: It was like having a high dose of antibiotics hit the body all at once.

Of course, this was obviously insane, so to the extent that I was able I conducted experiments, trying frequencies for random illnesses to see if they elicited the same effect (they did not), setting up blind experiments where I ran frequencies without knowing if they were for Lyme disease or not (I could always tell).

. . .

When I set out to write about the entire chronic-illness experience, I hesitated over whether to tell this kind of story. After all, if you’re trying to convince skeptical readers to take chronic sickness seriously, and to make the case for the medical-outsider view of how to treat Lyme disease, reporting that you’ve been dabbling in pseudoscience and that it works is a good way to confirm every stereotype about chronic ailments and their treatment: It’s psychosomatic … it’s all the power of suggestion … it’s a classic placebo effect … poor Ross, taken in by the quacks … he’ll be ‘doing his own research’ on vaccination next

    .

    But there are two good reasons to share this sort of story. The first is that it’s true, it really happened, and any testimony about what it’s like to fight for your health for years would be dishonest if it left the weird stuff out.

    The second is that this kind of experience — not the Rife machine specifically, but the experience of falling through the solid floor of establishment consensus and discovering something bizarre and surprising underneath — is extremely commonplace. And the interaction between the beliefs instilled by these experiences and the skepticism they generate (understandably) from people who haven’t had them, for whom the floor has been solid all their lives, is crucial to understanding cultural polarization in our time.

    On both sides of our national divides, insider and outsider, establishment and populist, something in human psychology makes us seek coherence and simplicity in our understanding of the world. So people who have a terrible experience with official consensus, and discover that some weird idea that the establishment derides actually seems to work, tend to embrace a new rule to replace the old one: that official knowledge is always wrong, that outsiders are always more trustworthy than insiders, that if Dr. Anthony Fauci or the Food and Drug Administration get some critical things wrong, you can’t trust them to get anything right.

    This impulse explains why fringe theories tend to cluster together, the world of outsider knowledge creating its own form of consensus and self-reinforcement. But it also explains the groupthink that the establishment often embraces in response, its fear that pure craziness automatically abounds wherever official knowledge fails, and its commitment to its own authority as the only thing standing between society and the abyss.

    This is a key dynamic in political as well as biomedical debates. The conspicuous elite failures in the last 20 years have driven many voters to outsider narratives, which blend plausible critiques of the system with outlandish paranoia. But the insiders only see the paranoia, the QAnon shaman and his allies at the gates. So instead of reckoning with their own failures, they pull up the epistemic drawbridge and assign fact checkers to patrol the walls. Which in turn confirms for outsiders their belief that the establishment has essentially blinded itself and only they have eyes to see.

    What we need, I’m convinced, are more people and institutions that sustain a position somewhere in between.

For the full commentary, see:

Ross Douthat. “How I Became Extremely Open-Minded.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, November 7, 2021): 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 6, 2021, and has the same title as the print version. The passages that are underlined above, were in italics in the original. In the underlined passages I use a hyphen were the original had ellipses.)

The passages quoted above are from a commentary adapted from Douthat’s book:

Douthat, Ross. The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. New York: Convergent Books, 2021.

Less-Ventilated Energy-Efficient Buildings Reduce Indoor Air Quality, Harming Cognitive Performance

(p. D6) A new study shows that poor indoor air quality is associated with subtle impairments in a number of cognitive functions, including our ability to concentrate and process information. The study tracked 302 office workers in commercial buildings in six countries — the United States, Britain, China, India, Mexico and Thailand — for 12 months.

The scientists used monitors to measure ventilation and indoor air quality in the buildings, including levels of fine particulate matter, which includes dust and minuscule particles from smoking, cleaning products and outdoor air pollution that seeps into the building. The workers were asked to use an app to take regular cognitive tests during the workday. The tests included simple math problems, as well as a tricky color and word brain teaser called the Stroop test, in which a word like “blue” or “purple” is printed in green or red ink.  . . .

The study found that the office workers in buildings with the poorest indoor air quality tended to perform worse on the brain teasers. While the effect wasn’t dramatic, the findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the air we breathe affects brain health.

. . .

“This study looked at how several factors in the indoor environment have an immediate impact on our cognitive function and performance,” said Joseph G. Allen, the director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings program and the study’s senior author. “This study shows that the air you’re breathing at your desk at that moment has an impact on how well you think.”

In the past, air quality control in buildings has been mostly focused on energy efficiency and comfort, with little consideration given to infection control or overall worker health.

. . .

Dr. Allen is the co-author of a new book, “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity.” He said he’s been encouraged to see more businesses and individuals taking indoor air quality more seriously as a result of the pandemic. Recently he saw a job posting at a major company advertising for a “head of healthy buildings” in the company’s global real estate division.

“It tells you that serious companies are changing how they approach their buildings, and they’re not thinking about this as a one-off during Covid,” said Dr. Allen.

. . .

“The pressure is coming from employees, parents of kids in school, teachers — there’s a heightened level of awareness and expertise,” said Dr. Allen. “How many people were talking about MERV 13 filters prior to the pandemic? This knowledge that our indoor spaces have been underperforming is not going away. I think people are rightly frustrated and fed up with it.”

For the full story, see:

Tara Parker-Pope. “What Bad Indoor Air Could Do to Your Brain.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 28, 2021): D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 28, 2021, and has the title “Is Bad Indoor Air Dulling Your Brain?”)

The book co-authored by Allen, and mentioned above, is:

Allen, Joseph G., and John D. Macomber. Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Jobs and Wages Improved for Black Americans During Pre-Pandemic Trump Years

(p. A11) Over the first three years of Mr. Trump’s presidency, blacks (and Hispanics) experienced record-low rates of unemployment and poverty, while wages for workers at the bottom of the income scale rose faster than they did for management. Whether that was the goal of the Trump administration or an unintended consequence is a debate I’ll leave to others. But there is no doubting that the financial situation of millions of working-class black Americans improved significantly under Mr. Trump’s policies.

. . .

. . . job growth accelerated, unemployment kept falling, and economic growth improved. In early 2017, the new president set about implementing what he had promised during the campaign: lower taxes and lighter regulation. He nominated Kevin Hassett, who had published research showing how corporate taxes depress wages for manufacturing workers, to lead the Council of Economic Advisers. He urged Congress to reduce the tax rate on corporate profits, which at 35% was one of the highest in the developed world.

. . .

Between 2017 and 2019, median household incomes grew by 15.4% among blacks and only 11.5% among whites. The investment bank Goldman Sachs released a paper in March 2019 that showed pay for those at the lower end of the wage distribution rising at nearly double the rate of pay for those at the upper end. Average hourly earnings were growing at rates that hadn’t been seen in almost a decade, but what “has set this rise apart is that it’s the first time during the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 that the bottom half of earners are benefiting more than the top half—in fact, about twice as much,” CNBC reported.

Citing a graph included in Goldman’s analysis, CNBC added that the “trend began in 2018”—the first year that the corporate tax cuts were in effect—“and has continued into this year and could be signaling a stronger economy than many experts think.”

For the full commentary, see:

Jason L. Riley. “The Trump Boom Lifted Black Americans.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, January 29, 2022): A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 28, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The passages from Riley’s commentary quoted above were adapted from his book:

Riley, Jason L. The Black Boom. West Conshocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2022.

When Humans Control Animals, Their Wily Resilience Can Cause “Unforeseen Consequences”

(p. A15) For the past three years, a gray squirrel has set out to ruin my life, chewing leaves off my beloved exotic hibiscus and geraniums.

. . .

. . . , Mary Roach’s “Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law” makes me feel grateful that my nemesis is only a rodent, and that I live in Ohio, not Colorado or India. My refrigerator will not be emptied by a bear; I will not be throttled by a leopard while taking out the compost.

. . .

There’s something demonic at work in India’s leopards and macaques, but the dilemma finds its root in human behavior. For centuries, feeding monkeys has been considered a religious offering, but this ritual has fueled a certain conviction on the monkeys’ part that humans are in service to them. Ms. Roach’s attempts to pin down government officials on how they might tackle the problem (including hiring more monkey catchers and staffing more monkey sterilization centers) are hilariously convoluted and laced with bizarre anecdotes. She’s passed from one office to the next and back again, never getting an answer. Before redirecting her, one official “veered off into a story about a macaque that got inside the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and took to pulling IV needles out of patients’ arms and sucking the glucose like a child with a straw in a pop bottle.”

During World War II, the U.S. military established a naval air station on Midway Atoll, the strategically significant string of islets halfway between North America and Asia. But the islands turned out to be also a significant nesting ground for thousands of albatrosses, and the result was hundreds of collisions between the airplanes and the huge soaring birds. It is heartbreaking to read of sailors being made to club the long-living albatrosses—80,000 in one assault, 21,000 in another—to reduce the population. Still, nature prevailed. “For a brief time the hazard to aircraft was reduced,” read one report. “The following season there appeared to be as many albatrosses as before.” After every possible deterrent and lethal attack on the gentle birds failed, the air base was closed and in 1993 converted into a refuge. The contrast between this midcentury horror and the reverence shown earlier this year for Wisdom, the 70-year-old Laysan albatross still nesting on Midway, could hardly be more stark.

. . .

This book is largely about the unspooling of unforeseen consequences, and our feeble attempts to put the animal genies we’ve freed back into their bottles.

For the full review, see:

Julie Zickefoose. “BOOKSHELF; Rebellious Nature.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 1, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Fuzz’ Review: Rebellious Nature.”)

The book under review is:

Roach, Mary. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Asteroids as Another Existential Threat

Do we best prepare for uncertain existential future threats by huge centrally planned government spending, or by allowing the flourishing of general purpose technologies and nimble entrepreneurs?

(p. C4) The most immediate threat isn’t from the largest or smallest asteroids but from those in between. Over the past two decades, asteroid hunters with NASA and other international space agencies have identified and tracked the orbits of more than 20,000 asteroids—also known as near-Earth objects—that pass through our neighborhood as they orbit the sun. Of those, about 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous—asteroids that are large enough (greater than 150 yards in diameter) to cause local destruction and that come close enough to Earth to someday pose a threat.

The good news is that scientists don’t expect any of these known asteroids to collide with Earth within at least the next century. Some will come pretty close, though: On an unlucky Friday the 13th in April 2029, the thousand-foot-wide asteroid Apophis will pass a mere 19,000 miles from Earth—closer than the satellites that bring us DISH TV.

But here’s the bad news: Hundreds of thousands of other near-Earth asteroids, both large and small, haven’t been identified. We have no idea where they are and where they are going. On Feb. 15, 2013, a relatively small, 60-foot-wide asteroid traveling at 43,000 mph exploded in the atmosphere near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, sending out a blast wave that injured 1,500 people. No one had seen the asteroid coming.

We need to find and track these unknown invaders as soon as possible. But while NASA’s “planetary defense” budget has been steadily increasing over the past decade, the $150 million allocated in 2019 for asteroid detection, asteroid tracking and related programs amounts to less than 1% of the space agency’s $21.5 billion budget.

For the full commentary, see:

Gordon L. Dillow. “The Asteroid Peril Isn’t Science Fiction.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 5, 2019): C4.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 5, 2019, and has the same title as the print version.)

Dillow’s commentary is related to his book:

Dillow, Gordon L. Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth. New York: Scribner, 2019.

Could Principled Investors Make the Walt Disney Company Great Again?

Robert Nozick defended firms that maximize profits subject to ethical side constraints. Presumably the ethical side constraints include not capitulating to totalitarian governments that suppress free speech. The recent “meme” investors in GameStop and AMC sparked in me the question whether principled investors loyal to ethical side constraints could return the Walt Disney Company to the principled greatness of Walt Disney, the man?

(p. 1) It has been a year since Mat Bowen, who was the pastor of a small church in Gibson City, Ill., had the dream — the one where Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, urged him to buy Dogecoin.

Mr. Bowen had just begun to dabble in investing. He soon discovered WallStreetBets, the online forum on Reddit where throngs of small investors were plotting to buy shares of GameStop, the troubled video game retailer, in a bid to teach Wall Street a lesson. Some hedge funds had bet that shares of GameStop would fall. Instead, they took off, as the investors banded together last January to drive the price up more than 1,700 percent.

Caught up in the frenzy, Mr. Bowen bought GameStop, too. In July [2021], he quit the church to become a full-time trader, convinced he was joining a fight against financial injustice.

The beliefs underpinning last year’s meme stock phenomenon are stronger than ever. For a large number of individual investors, the stock market has become the battleground on which they join forces to right perceived wrongs and fight the powerful. So much so that when the stock market seesawed this past week, many small investors were undeterred. Falling prices were another opportunity to buy more shares of their favorite companies.

“The reason I am still in this, and the reason I am willing to ride these stocks to zero, is for my fellow citizens,” said Mr. Bowen, who received his master’s degree in divinity (p. 7) at the Princeton Theological Seminary. He cast the so-called meme stock fight in moral terms. “The battle of good versus evil is not just limited to the walls of a church or a synagogue or a mosque,” he said.

. . .

Jesus Gonzalez was drawn into the meme stock trade by what he saw as a power imbalance. Mr. Gonzalez, 22, had invested in stocks off and on as a teenager, but “AMC and GameStop are different from any other play in the stock market,” he said. “We have never seen a congregation of retail investors who have collectively come together on the internet and formed the largest, most powerful decentralized hedge fund in the world.”

Mr. Gonzalez, who graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance last month, is buying more shares of GameStop and AMC, even though his $220,000 portfolio is off 37 percent from its November [2021] high, he said.

His 34-year-old sister, Ruby Gonzalez, a behavioral health therapist who works at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and is studying to become a nurse, followed her brother’s lead and invested most of her savings in the two companies. “I want to change market manipulation,” she said.

For the full story, see:

Tara Siegel Bernard, Emily Flitter and Anupreeta Das. “How GameStop Turned into a Fight for Good vs. Evil.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, January 30, 2022): 1 & 7.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 29, 2022, and has the title “Buy GameStop, Fight Injustice. Just Don’t Sell.”)

Robert Nozick’s libertarian masterpiece is:

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974.

Expert Medical Advice Often Flip-Flops

(p. D6) A History of Medical Flip-Flops

Shifting medical advice is surprisingly common, and it tends to fall into three categories: emerging guidance, replacement advice and reversals.

Emerging guidance comes during times of crisis — like pandemics — and is destined to change quickly. In the past several months, guidance about the best way to treat Covid patients, masks to prevent transmission and the limits of vaccine protection have all shifted as knowledge of the coronavirus and its variants has evolved.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between replacement advice, which is issued when research improves on advice that came before it, and a full reversal, which comes about because a common medical practice got ahead of the science and never actually worked or even caused harm. Here are some examples of true medical flip-flops in recent years.

MENOPAUSE HORMONES TO PROTECT THE HEART: In 2002, decades of advice about the heart benefits of menopause hormones seemed to change overnight when a major study called the Women’s Health Initiative was halted after researchers detected more heart attacks in the women taking hormones. In hindsight, doctors had misinterpreted data from observational research. The current advice: Hormones can relieve menopause symptoms but shouldn’t be used for chronic disease prevention.

VIOXX AS A LOWER-RISK ARTHRITIS TREATMENT: In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration approved Vioxx as a breakthrough pain reliever because it lowered the risk of gastrointestinal problems. But by 2004, Merck had withdrawn the drug because studies showed it significantly raised the risk of heart attack.

ARTHROSCOPIC SURGERY ON AGING KNEES: For years, the partial removal of torn meniscus tissue was the most common orthopedic procedure in the United States, with about 700,000 performed a year. In 2013, a researcher in Finland compared the operation to a “sham” procedure and found there was no benefit. Most doctors now recommend physical therapy instead.

VITAMIN MEGADOSES TO LOWER CANCER AND HEART RISK: For years, doctors believed various vitamins could lower risk for cancer and heart disease, but a number of studies showed just the opposite. A study of beta carotene and vitamin A found that the supplements actually increased the risk of lung cancer in male smokers. A study of vitamin E and selenium, thought to protect against prostate cancer, increased risk for the disease.

STENTS FOR STABLE HEART DISEASE: Doctors used to insert stents — tiny wire mesh tubes that prop open arteries — in millions of otherwise stable patients with heart disease. A study found that the surgical procedure was no better than drug therapy for preventing heart attacks.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, associate professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Dr. Adam S. Cifu, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Department of Medicine, coined the term “medical reversal” and concluded that about 40 percent of common medical practices that they reviewed turned out to be useless or harmful. In their book, “Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives,” they noted that most of these failed treatments were initially embraced because they were based on logical reasoning.

“The thing that’s often behind reversal: All of these things have a good story, they have good pathophysiological rationale,” Dr. Cifu said. “They should work. But things only work if they’ve been shown in people to work, and people are so complicated.”

For the full story, see:

Tara Parker-Pope. “Shifting Medical Advice Is a Feature, Not a Bug.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 2, 2021): D6.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 24, 2021, and has the title “Is the New Aspirin Advice a Medical Flip-Flop, or Just Science?” The paragraphs on menopause hormones to protect the heart and on vitamin megadoses to lower cancer and heart risk appear in the online version, but not in the print version.)

The book co-authored by Prasad and mentioned above is:

Prasad, Vinayak K., and Adam S. Cifu. Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Johan Hultin Self-Funded Trip to Find 1918 Flu Virus in the Permafrost

(p. B9) Dr. Hultin’s quest to find victims of the 1918 flu was sparked in 1950 by an offhand remark over lunch with a University of Iowa microbiologist, William Hale. Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.

Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.

After persuading the university to provide him with a $10,000 stipend, Dr. Hultin set off for Alaska. It was early June 1951.

. . .

He removed still-frozen lung tissue from the victims, closed the grave and took the tissue back to Iowa, keeping it frozen on dry ice in the passenger compartment of a small plane.

Back in the lab, Dr. Hultin tried to grow the virus by injecting the lung tissue into fertilized chicken eggs — the standard way to grow flu viruses. He was caught up in the excitement of his experiment, he said, and had not thought about the possible danger of introducing a deadly virus into the world.

“I remember the sleepless nights,” he said. “I couldn’t wait for morning to come to charge into my lab and look at the eggs.”

But the virus was not growing.

He tried squirting lung tissue into the nostrils of guinea pigs, white mice and ferrets, but again he failed to revive the virus.

“The virus was dead,” he said.

Dr. Hultin never published his results but bided his time, working as a pathologist in private practice in San Francisco and hoping for another opportunity to resurrect that virus.

His chance came in 1997, when, sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.

Dr. Hultin immediately wrote to Dr. Taubenberger, telling him about his trip to Alaska. He offered to return to Brevig to see if he could find more flu victims.

“I remember getting that letter and thinking: ‘Gosh. This is really incredible. This is amazing,’” Dr. Taubenberger said in an interview this week. He thought the next step would be to apply for a grant for Dr. Hultin to return to Brevig. If all went well, Dr. Hultin might go back in a year or two.

Dr. Hultin had a different idea.

“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.

He added that he would go alone and pay for the trip himself so that there would be no objections from funding agencies, no delays, no ethics committees and no publicity.

. . .

Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.

. . .

Before results from the study of the Brevig woman’s virus were published, Dr. Hultin asked the villagers if they wanted the village to be identified in a news release and a journal article. They might be besieged by media. “Maybe you won’t like that,” he warned them.

The Brevig residents came to a consensus: Publish the paper and identify the village. Dr. Hultin was listed as a co-author.

For the full obituary, see:

Gina Kolata. “Dr. Johan Hultin, 97, Whose Work Helped Map 1918 Pandemic, Dies.” The New York Times (Friday, January 28, 2022): B9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated January 28, 2022, and has the title “Johan Hultin, Who Found Frozen Clues to 1918 Virus, Dies at 97.”)

Gina Kolata devotes a chapter to Hultin’s search for the 1918 flu virus in her book:

Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1999.

Even in Old Age Miner George Hearst Retained His “Tenacity, Demon Energy and Genius”

(p. A15) George Hearst was famous for discovering metals—copper, silver, gold—but he liked any mineral he could pull out of the earth. New Year’s Eve 1889 found him far from his San Francisco home, in West Virginia’s coal country. “We found the coal veins all right,” said Hearst’s traveling companion, T.J. Clunie, a young California state senator. “The samples were fine, the price was low, and I expected to see Hearst snap at the offer.” But Hearst was hesitant. “I don’t like to buy a pig in a poke,” he said. “We had better crawl up and see that coal for ourselves before we discuss the price.” That meant scaling a 3,000-foot hill.

At the summit Hearst found a vein of coal, hacked out a chunk, and set it on fire. The flame sputtered and died in seconds. He tossed the lump aside and went looking for another. He found a different vein, hacked out another piece and ignited it. This one burned steadily for 10 minutes, Clunie recalled, while Hearst watched it “as a mother does her first-born.” Hearst scrambled back down the hill and bought the vein. He was 69 years old.

Stomach cancer would claim Hearst barely a year later, but as Matthew Bernstein demonstrates in “George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age,” the old miner went about his work right to the end with the same tenacity, demon energy and genius for finding what he was after that had made him one of the richest men in the American West.

. . .

Hearst did occasionally interrupt his prospecting. On a visit home to Missouri, the 40-year-old prospector fell for an 18-year-old named Phoebe Apperson, and married her in 1862. It was a happy match—he certainly wasn’t around enough to get on her nerves—and they produced one child, William Randolph Hearst, who would embed himself in the national memory even more deeply than his father.

. . .

. . ., there is a warmth to the man that makes him good company throughout the book, and charm in his downright language, as when he said, “When I was young I had very strong religious views, and was brought up to a thoroughly orthodox way; but after leaving home my ideas got broader, and on studying these things for myself, without any influence from parents, or ministers, I came to the conclusion that I knew just about as much about it as anybody, and I knew nothing.”

For the full review, see:

Richard Snow. “BOOKSHELF; A Head For Metals.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 13, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 12, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘George Hearst’ Review: A Head for Metals.”)

The book under review is:

Bernstein, Matthew. George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021.