THCB

Categories

Tag: Mike Magee

Is American Apartheid Lurking in The Oval Office Shadows?

By MIKE MAGEE

For aging Boomers, it is impossible not to hear echoes of Apartheid re-emerging with force 3/4 of a century after the battle for social justice here and in far away lands was fully engaged. The Musk assault, disguised as “efficiency” is little more than stealing money from the poor to give to the rich, and widens an already extraordinary income gap.

The assault is large enough to draw condemnation from a dying Pope Francis, forced to remind Trump, Musk and their enablers of the historic Jesus and the tenets of Liberation Theology.

Our college years in the 1960’s were accompanied by chaos and crisis, and guided by fundamental Judeo-Christian values. My college, the Jesuit-led Le Moyne College, was activist to its core. The movement was championed by two priests, brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. With the assassinations of JFK, his brother Robert, and MLK;  LBJ’s Great Society legislative battles; the Civil Rights movement;  and the Vietnam War,  America was literally on fire at the time.

It was during this decade as well that a largely student-driven movement emerged to oppose Apartheid in South Africa and rapidly spread worldwide. A seminal feature of that movement was mass education and demonstrations with a goal of creating economic pressure on the leaders of South Africa by divestiture of all stocks and investments that benefited the nation.

Continue reading…

Disruption For the Sake of Disruption Is Not Innovation

By MIKE MAGEE

“The technological leaps of the 1900s — microelectronics, antibiotics, chemotherapy, liquid-fueled rockets, Earth-observing satellites, lasers, LED lights, disease-resistant seeds and so forth — derived from science. But these technologies also spent years being improved, tweaked, recombined and modified to make them achieve the scale and impact necessary for innovations.”    Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory.”

The Idea Factory is a history of Bell Labs, spanning six decades from 1920 to 1980. Published a decade ago, the author deliberately focused on the story inside the story. As he laid out his intent, Jon Gertner wrote “…when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offered us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.”

One of the scholars Gertner likes to reference is Clayton Christensen. As a professor at Harvard Business School, he coined the term “disruptive innovation.” The Economist magazine loved him, labeling him in 2020 “the most influential management thinker of his time.”

A process thinker, Christensen deconstructed innovation, exploring “how waves of technological change can follow predictable patterns.” Others have come along and followed in his steps.

  1. Identify a technologic advance with a potential functional market niche.
  2. Promote its appeal as a “must have” to users.
  3. Drop the cost.
  4. Surreptitiously push aside or disadvantage competitors.
  5. Manage surprises.

Medical innovations often illustrate all five steps, albeit not necessarily in that order. Consider the X-ray. Its discovery is attributed to Friedrich Rontgen (Roentgen), a mechanical engineering chair of Physics at the University of Wurzburg. It was in a lab at his university that he was exploring the properties of electrically generated cathode rays in 1896.

He created a glass tube with an aluminum window at one end. He attached electrodes to a spark coil inside the vacuum tube and generated an electrostatic charge. On the outside of the window opening he placed a barium painted piece of cardboard to detect what he believed to be “invisible rays.” With the charge, he noted a “faint shimmering” on the cardboard. In the next run, he put a lead sheet behind the window and noted that it had blocked the ray-induced shimmering.

Not knowing what to call the rays, he designated them with an “X” – and thus the term “X-ray.” Two weeks later, he convinced his wife to place her hand in the line of fire, and the cardboard behind. The resultant first X-ray image (of her hand) led her to exclaim dramatically, “I have seen my death.” A week later, the image was published under the title “Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen” (On A New Kind of Rays).

Continue reading…

Who Will Oppose American Apartheid?

By MIKE MAGEE

This past month Bishop Mariann E. Budde drew the Episcopal Church into the national spotlight through a single act of courage. She is not the first, nor likely the last from this denomination to do so. There is a history. More on that in a moment.

The Episcopal church is an offshoot of the Anglican Church of England which dates back to 1534 when King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Pope who opposed his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Two-hundred and fifty four years later, in 1789, Anglican Church leaders who had helped settle colonies in North America, gathered to form a united Episcopal Church, revising their Book of Common Prayer to exclude its blessing to the English monarch.

Though declining in modern times, missionary minded Anglicans spread throughout the British empire and remain connected to the mother Church as members of the Anglican Communion. For example, British Anglican military chaplains were part of the force that occupied Cape Colony in South Africa in 1795. By 1821, they had established a formal religious foothold. Today, they claim 3.5 million members. In 2012, they elected their first female bishop, Ellinah Wamukoya of Swaziland. And yet, arguably the most influential female Anglican from South Africa is an immigrant to America, an emotional ally of Bishop Budde, and a retired Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

Her name is Margaret Marshall, and her place in American history dates back to June 6, 1966. That was the date this then 20 year old student, who was vice-president of the National Union of South African Students, was asked to stand in for the organization’s president, Ian Robertson (who was under house arrest for speaking out about Apartheid). She met and transported Bobby Kennedy to speak to over 1000 university students packed into the college auditorium at their “Day of Affirmation.”

Much like Mariann Budde last week in Washington, Bobby Kennedy caught his hushed audience by surprise that evening with these opening remarks:

“I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which was once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”

Margaret Marshall, some six decades later, recalled that moment in a conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin. She said, “There was great tension in the room. People were on edge…As soon as the audience realized what he said, there was laughter and a sense of total relief. It was simply fabulous.”

Continue reading…

All The Way With LBJ – A Half Century After His Passing

By MIKE MAGEE

This is the 52nd anniversary of the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson from his 5th Heart Attack. And two days ago was the 39th anniversary of the first celebration of a new federal holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In signing that original proclamation in 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, “The majesty of his message, the dignity of his bearing, and the righteousness of his cause are a lasting legacy. In a few short years he changed America for all time.”

The MLK federal holiday was not so “Kum ba yah” (“Come by here”) this year. President Trump was in no mood to be tutored on this 60’s phrase derived from an African American spiritual made famous by Pete Seeger. Rather, he took advantage of the convergence of MLK’s day and his own coronation to trash all things DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).

Of those supporting the 2nd term President, from here and beyond, few could have had a broader smile on his face than dearly departed (July 4, 2008) former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Helm led the opposition to the MLK bill, submitting a 300-page report that labelled King an “action-oriented Marxist” and a communist. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY) was so enraged at the time that he declared the report a “packet of filth”, threw it on the Senate floor, and then unceremoniously repeatedly stomped on it.

So, as a nation, we have been down this road before.

Continue reading…

Sleep: Watch This Space

By MIKE MAGEE

In case you’ve missed it, sleep is all the rage in neurosciences these days. They are fast at work rebranding it “the brain’s rinse cycle.”  The brain, protectively encased in an unyielding bony casing, lacks the delicate lymphatic system that transports used body metabolites to breakdown and extraction sites in all other parts of the body.

But in 2012, neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard, identified a unique network of delicate channels (“tiny passages alongside blood vessels”) inside the brain that collect and discharge brain metabolites and waste materials including amyloid. This system, or “ultimate brainwasher” as some labeled it, was formally titled the “glymphatic system.”

That same study also suggested that flow through the glymphatic system is enhanced during portions of the sleep cycle. Now 12 years after the original research, the same team, in a study in mice published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA journal, found that regular contractions or oscillations of tiny blood vessels in the brain, stimulated by adrenaline cousin, norepinephrine, generated the brain scrubbing liquid flow through the channel system. The focal contractions, normally occurring ever 50 seconds, speed up the pump to every 10 seconds, in sync with peaks of norepinephrine release during sleep.

Sleep deprivation appears to not only interrupt this cycle, and allow harmful wastes to accumulate, but also disrupts other mental health functions that scientists are just beginning to understand. For example, researchers in 2021 established that “sleep deprivation impairs people’s ability to suppress unwanted thoughts.” They were able to identify a special location on the brain cortex responsible for storing away memories, and  suppressing and delaying their future retrieval. They further demonstrated enhanced activity at the site during REM sleep. As the lead investigator noted, “That’s interesting because many disorders associated with debilitating intrusive thoughts, such as depression and PTSD, are also associated with disturbances in REM.”

The new work may help explain destructive recycling of historic conflicts among and between Silicon Valley AI uber-competitors. They may not be getting enough sleep, recycling historic grudges and grievances.

As the sleep scientists reported in the December, 2024 publication, “The functional impairments arising from sleep deprivation are linked to a behavioral deficit in the ability to downregulate unwanted memories, and coincide with a deterioration of deliberate patterns of self-generated thought. We conclude that sleep deprivation gives rise to intrusive memories via the disruption of neural circuits governing mnemonic inhibitory control, which may rely on REM sleep.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

Past Presidents Posthumous Advice To Trump #47

By MIKE MAGEE

For those many, many millions of viewers who tuned in to the live coverage of former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral this week, they were rewarded with two hours of intriguing video images, and moving words and song, including a recounting of the beginnings of environmental advocacy as Los Angeles burns, and John Lennon’s “Imagine” performed by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.

Five former Presidents and four Vice-Presidents were in attendance. And there were notable firsts, like the first greeting and handshake between incoming President Trump and former VP Pence since January 6, 2021.

But perhaps the most striking events of this carefully staged national funeral were the  two especially haunting posthumous eulogies delivered by the sons of a former president and vice-president. Presented by Steven Ford, son of former President, Gerald Ford, and Ted Mondale, son of former Vice-President Walter “Fritz” Mondale, they appeared to be directed to America itself, and its’ soon-to-be 47th president.

As the speakers explained, Jimmy Carter, some years back, asked both Ford and Mondale if they would be willing to present eulogies at his funeral. Both agreed, and put pen to paper in anticipation. But as it became evident that Carter might very well outlive them, they each asked their sons, in that event, to read their remarks at his funeral. And today they did.

Both President Ford and Vice-President Mondale’s words (voiced by their sons) deserve a full viewing when time allows. But in the meantime, let me share the closing remarks of each, prescient and timely now, at American democracy’s hour of need.

Steven Ford, son of former President Gerald Ford (7/14/13 – 12/26/06), reciting the president’s written words posthumously:

“…Now is time to say goodbye, our grief comforted with the joy and the thanksgiving of knowing this man, this beloved man, this very special man. He was given the gift of years, and the American people and the people of the world will be forever blessed by his decades of good works. Jimmy Carter’s legacy of peace and compassion will remain unique as it is timeless…As for myself, Jimmy, I’m looking forward to our reunion. We have much to catch up on. Thank you, Mr. President. Welcome home, old friend.”

Ted Mondale, son of former Vice-President Walter “Fritz” Mondale (1/5/28 – 4/19/21) reciting the vice-president’s written words posthumously.

Ted prefaced his reading with this sentence – “My father wrote this in 2019, and clearly he edited it a number of times since then, but here we go.”

“…Two decades ago, President Carter said he believed income inequality was the biggest global issue. More recently, in a 2018 Commencement Address at Liberty University, I think now the largest global issue is the discrimination against women and girls in this world. He concluded that, ‘Until stubborn attitudes that foster discrimination against women change, the world cannot advance, and poverty and poverty and income equality cannot be solved.’ Towards the end of our time in the White House, the President and I were talking about how we might describe what we tried to accomplish in office. We came up with a sentence which remains an important summary of our work. ‘We told the truth. We obeyed the law. And we kept the peace.’ That we did, Mr. President. I will always be proud and grateful to have had the chance to work with you towards noble ends. It was then, and will always be, the most rewarding experience of my public career. Thank you.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

Public Health Policy: At the Intersection of Law and Medicine.

By MIKE MAGEE

As 2025 kicks off, it’s wise to pause, and gather our thoughts as a nation. Few would argue that we’ve been through a lot over the past decade. And quite naturally, we humans are prone to blame individuals rather than circumstances (most of which have been beyond our control) for creating an environment that feels as if it is unraveling before our eyes.

How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Is peace, contentment, and security achievable in this still young nation? Have accelerationist technocrats, armed with bitcoins and Martian fantasy, short-circuited our moment in time that had been preserved for recovery from a deadly pandemic that eliminated a million of our fellow citizens seemingly overnight?

Who do we turn to for answers, now that we’ve largely lost faith and trust in our politicians, our religious leaders, and our journalists? And how exactly do you create a healthy nation? Certainly not by taking doctors and nurses offline for miscarriages, and placing local bureaucrats in exam rooms. Are they prepared to deal with life and death decisions? Are they trained to process human fear and worry? Do they know how to instill hopefulness in parents who are literally “scared to death” because their child has just been diagnosed with cancer? It certainly must require more than a baseball cap with MAHA on it to heal this nation.

Historians suggest this will take time. As Stanford Professor of Law, Lawrence M. Friedman, wrote in A History of American Law, “One hundred and sixty-nine years went by between Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence. The same length of time separates 1776 and the end of World War II.”

During those very early years that preceded the formal declaration and formation of the United States as a nation, our various, then British colonies, fluidly and independent of each other, did their best first to survive, and then to organize into shared communities with codified laws and regulations. It was “a study of social development unfolding over time” impacted by emotions, politics and real-time economics. At the core of the struggle (as we saw with the pandemic, and now the vaccine controversy) was a clash between the rights of the individual and those of the collective community.

This clash of values has been playing out in full view over the past five years of the Covid pandemic. In 2023, Washington Post columnist, Dr. Leana Wen, asked, “Whose rights are paramount? The individual who must give up freedoms, or those around them who want to lower infection risk?”

Continue reading…

“Comparisons Are Toxic.” True or False?

by MIKE MAGEE

THCB is back from its end of year break, but we are starting with a little catchup from December from Mike Magee.

As my wife often reminds me, “Comparisons are toxic.” And, in general, I agree and try to respect this cardinal rule. But these are extraordinary times. So grant me this exception.

On December 9, 2024, in my early morning survey of the news, two articles demanded my attention. The first was an editorial in the New York Times with the self-explanatory title, “My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment” by Paul Krugman. The second was an article published that morning in Nature titled “Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold” authored by “Google Quantum AI and Collaborators,” a blanket label for a team of 300+ engineers led by Founder and Leader, Hartmut Neven. More on him in a moment.

As a loyal reader of Krugman, I read his “last column” carefully – twice. Over 25 years I’ve admired this specialist’s (global economics) willingness and interest to wander often into generalist, cross-sector, liberal arts territory. No match for his Nobel winning intellect or pure-bred education at MIT, Yale and Princeton, I do share a history of common geography (upstate New York in our early years, and the New York metropolitan area later on); an upbringing in religious households (Jewish and Catholic); and more than two uninterrupted decades of weekly published columns.

Though I have not always agreed with his take on every issue, I count myself as an admirer. The issues that have interested him, both pro and con, over the years, are more often than not the same issues that have troubled or encouraged me. So I was not surprised that he chose, in his “last column,” to reflect on the recent election, and the current levels of anger, violence and resentment in our society. And while I agree with the findings in his examination of the body politic, we arrived at a different diagnosis.

Krugman writes, “What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then (25 years ago) and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. . . some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now . . . are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

As for the diagnosis, in response to the question he himself raises (“Why did this optimism curdle?”), he answers, “As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites.” And the treatment for this disease? “if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.”

Now that sent me back to Hartmut and the Nature article for a reality check.  Were American oligarchs and technocrats, with wild wealth and even wilder ideas, the cause of every day people jumping aboard the Trump cult train?

Nevin is 9 years younger than Krugman. He is a German-trained PhD physicist who came to the University of Southern California as an entrepreneurial research professor in computer science in 1998. His several start-ups which were focused on “face recognition technology and real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation” helped make him famous and rich when they were purchased by Google in 2006. But his fantastical dream was to create a “quantum chip” that would outperform anything that currently existed.

Six years later, he launched the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and by 2016, he had come up with an experiment (still ongoing) to prove “quantum supremacy.” Starting his own chip fabrication factory in Santa Barbara, his dream became concrete. He took a world view in 2020, stating:  “It’s not one company versus another, but rather, humankind versus nature — or humankind with nature.”

Nevin believes he is in the right place at the right time. The AI Arms Race is full on and relies on ever increasing data consumption to support generative self-learning. That demands enormous consuming power. In his words, “Both (quantum computing and AI) will prove to be the most transformational technologies of our time, but advanced AI will significantly benefit from access to quantum computing. This is why I named our lab Quantum AI.”

Quantum computing is measured in “qubits” (which are the size of a single atom) versus the binary digit measure of standard computers, called the “bit.” As the New York Times explained, “Quantum bits, or ‘qubits,’ behave very differently from normal bits. A single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time when it is either extremely small or extremely cold.” The test using exotic metals cooled to 460 degrees below zero, reported out on October 9th that Hartmut’s quantum chip “performed a computation in under 5 minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 septillion) years to compute.”

But that’s not the amazing part. In past experiments, the device was error prone, and the more qubits, the less reliable the computations. But now, for the first time, this group was able to demonstrate the more qubits in play, the more accurate the outcome. As Nevin explained, “This historic accomplishment is known in the field as ‘below threshold’ — being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.” How big was that? According to Javad Shaman, director of the Center for Quantum Information Physics at NYU, “one of the highlights of the recent decade.”

Nevin doesn’t seem to “worry about being admired.” In his blog this week he tied his qubit “below threshold” accomplishment to “helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives.” That seems a far cry from Paul Krugman’s highlighting of “the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.”

Gallup has been conducting an annual survey of “Americans Satisfaction With The Way Things Are Going In The U.S.” for roughly a half century. Currently only 22% say they are satisfied. Back in 1986, that number peaked at 70%. That was the year that Robert Fulcrum wrote a little book that remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for nearly two years. Some criticized the book as “trite and saccharine,” but 17 million copies of his books remain in circulation.

The 1986 book was titled, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”  Here are his top ten learnings:

  1. Share everything.
  2. Play fair.
  3. Don’t hit people.
  4. Put things back where you found them.
  5. Clean up your own mess.
  6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
  7. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
  8. Wash your hands before you eat.
  9. Flush.
  10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

I was trying to figure how members of my own family could vote for a man to lead our nation who routinely and deliberately breaks most of these rules. I’ve come up with two reasons:

  1. Greed. They simply don’t want to share any of their wealth or good fortune with others.
  2. Religious certainty. They do not believe in separation of Church and State, and do not respect individual self-determination and free will. And yet values can not be enforced on human beings. They must be freely embraced to become permanently embedded.

Comparisons may be toxic, but Hartmut and Paul point us toward the truth. We (not our leaders regardless of their human deficits) are responsible. And we as citizens of America need to get our act together. As Nevin the information scientist teaches, optimism flows from purpose and the promise of service. And Krugman, the Nobel economist, teaches that money alone can not buy you love – or peace, or lasting joy, or contentment.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Health Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

Ten Shadowy Figures Who Shaped Our Health Care System

By MIKE MAGEE

The incoming Trump Administration nominees for positions in Health and Human Services (like RFK Jr. to direct the department and Mehmet Oz to head Medicare and Medicaid Services) are names you know and apparently many trust? In this morning’s New York Times, Dr. Ashish Jha, President Biden’s Covid lead, thinks he knows why. He says, “You have a large swath of the population facing a health crisis, and they feel like medicine and public health isn’t delivering…They’re much more open to people saying, ‘The whole system is corrupt and we have to blow the whole thing up.’”  As Ashish knows better than most, we didn’t arrive here out of the blue. Over the years, many of the players who had the greatest impact on America’s health care system as we know it, remain hidden in the historic shadows. Here (in no particular order) are 10 of the least known but most influential figures in shaping health policy in our lifetime.

Sam Massengill

In spring 1937, the head of sales for S.E. Massengill Company in Bristol, Tennessee, went to the company head, Samuel Evans Massengill, with an idea generated by customer feedback. Massengill salesmen were passing along reports from doctors that there was demand among parents of young children suffering from strep throat for a liquid version of their new sulfa drug.

Massengill, charged the company’s chief chemist, Harold Cole Watkins, to find an effective solvent in which powdered sulfanilamide (an anti-biotic) could be dissolved. His choice was diethylene glycol, which smoothly dissolved sulfanilamide powder and led to a concoction that was 10 percent sulfanilamide, 72 percent diethylene glycol, and 16 percent water. Flavored with raspberry extract, saccharine, and caramel, it passed the taste and smell tests, but in keeping with then current federal regulations—or lack thereof—there was no test for safety. In fact, no one did even a rudimentary check of the literature on diethylene glycol, which would have quickly revealed that it was a highly toxic component of brake fluid, wallpaper stripper, and antifreeze that had caused a fatality in 1930.

Instead, perhaps sensing that its competition would be right behind, Massengill rushed its “Elixir Sulfanilamide” into production, then shipped 240 gallons of the red liquid to 31 states through a network of small distributors in early September 1937.

Within two weeks, children began to die. In all, more than 100 children died, but only after going through 7 to 21 days of wrenchingly painful illness including “stoppage of urine, severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, stupor, and convulsions.”

The whole disaster was vigorously reported in the press, and drug safety soon inched its way up the list of New Deal priorities. By June 11, 1938, bills from the Senate and House of Representatives had been reconciled, and on June 25, 1938, President Roosevelt signed into law the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

Samuel Massengill belatedly issued a statement on behalf of his company: “My chemists and I deeply regret the fatal results, but there was no error in the manufacture of the product. . . . I do not feel there was any responsibility on our part.” Unfortunately, Massengill’s morally blind position reflected the letter of the law at that time. In short, the absence of effective legal sanctions meant that a company or an individual could indeed sell a deadly medication and get away with it.

Mary Lasker

Born in 1900, Mary Lasker was the daughter of Frank Elwin Woodard, the head of the local bank in Watertown, Wisconsin, and a shrewd businessman with Chicago connections. By her own account, she was a campaigner almost from birth, and she traced her interest in promoting medical research back to an event she experienced at the age of three or four. Her mother, a local community supporter and civic activist, took Mary to see their ailing servant, a Mrs. Belter, who had undergone a double mastectomy as treatment for breast cancer. “I thought, this shouldn’t happen to anybody,” Mary Lasker later wrote.

As a young adult, she began to focus on health policy issues and became a devotee to Margaret Sanger. Mary sought out financial support for the organization, turning to a dynamic advertising man, Albert Lasker, who had launched some of America’s most recognizable consumer brands, including Lucky Strike cigarettes. Known as the “father of modern advertising,” Lasker is credited for suggesting that the Control Federation of America be renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation.

When Albert asked Mary what she wanted to accomplish, she listed reforms in health insurance, cancer research, and research against tuberculosis. Albert responded, “Well, for that you don’t need my kind of money. You need federal money, and I will show you how to get it.”

When Mary and Albert married in 1940, the world was preparing for war.

Beginning in 1942, the Laskers began to cultivate science luminaries who shared their commitment to maximizing government funding of applied research. The Laskers realized early that they would need a credible health-related national organization to anchor and launch their campaign and set their sights on the American Society for the Control of Cancer, an organization created in 1913 by 10 physicians meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City. The leadership was more than happy to grant the Laskers easy entry to their Board of Trustees in return for financial support. By 1944, the Laskers had seized control of the Board, largely dumped the doctors, and renamed the group the American Cancer Society (ACS). Its leadership was now composed of name-brand corporate heads, entertainment giants, and advertising executives.

To add further glory to the idea of Big Science, Mary and Albert created the annual Lasker Awards, with the somewhat self-serving tagline “Sometimes called ‘America’s Nobels.’” She then began to collect academic researchers, promote their careers, injecting publicity and special placement on government bodies. Over a decade she was at the center of creating seventeen specialty Institutes within the new NIH, most built around her favored scientists.

Mary Lasker died in 1994, a controversial figure.In the assessment of author and political journalist Elizabeth Drew, “Mrs. Lasker has been considered an able woman who has done good things but is too covetous of power, too insistent on her pursuits, too confident of her own expertise in the minutiae of medicine.”

William Menninger

During the first major WW II battle in North Africa, a startling number of soldiers were incapacitated with “Shell Shock.” One neurologist in North Africa, Frederick R. Hanson, discovered that a bit of kindness in the form of a hot shower and a warm meal, combined with sedation-induced rest, was remarkably successful in rehabilitating the majority of the “mentally incapacitated” men under his care.

Hanson’s success did not go unnoticed by the Army’s chief of the division of neuropsychiatry in the Office of the Surgeon General, William C. Menninger. After studying his results, he decided that if psychiatric casualties in a standard unit exceeded one mental casualty for every four wounded in action, this was a harbinger of broader problems—like a breakdown in morale, leadership issues, prolonged combat fatigue, or a policy breakdown in the evacuation scheme.

Continue reading…

THCB Gang Episode 146, Tuesday November 26

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Tuesday November 26 at 1PM PT 4PM ET are THCB regular writer and ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee); and a new guest from Marsh McLennan, Employee Benefits Consultant Ryan Koo (@RyanKoo).

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.