Errata to Fortuitous Coincidences

Last month, a commenter at this blog’s blogfather, AdvoAdvo, if you read this, please drop me a line so that I can thank you directly., recommended Thomas Hager’s The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug (2006) (Demon). This book offers an interesting, well-written popular account of the discovery of the first widely effective class of antibiotics, the sulfa drugs, and its discoverer, Gerhard Domagk. That account covers some of the same events recounted in this blog last year. While these accounts largely agree where they overlap, there are some discrepancies which deserve pointing out and at least an attempt at resolution.

Fortuitous Coincidences

Update August 13, 2016: Some details in the below account are in need of correction. Please see this post.

Update: Added the interesting and somewhat disturbing footnotes 4, 5 and 6.

The author’s grandfather FPreviously mentioned here. spent a semester in the early 1930s as a visiting professor at the University of Berlin. There he made two acquaintances that the author must consider fortuitous for he most likely owes his existence to their combination. One of them was I, a clever and pretty post-doc of Junker blood, who in due course became his grandmother. The other was a medical researcher named Gerhard Domagk.

F eventually returned to Sweden with I. In 1935, I gave birth to A, the author’s mother.Previously mentioned here. In 1937, when A was two years old, she fell deadly ill with a bacterial infection. When the best efforts of current medicine failed to cure her, F telegraphed his friend Domagk. For Domagk was said to be working on a wonder drug to combat bacterial infection, today known as Sulfa-class antibiotics. Domagk couriered a sample from Berlin to F in Stockholm and A promptly recovered.

In 1939, the Nobel Prize Committee in Physiology or Medicine awarded Domagk the Prize. While Domagk surely deserved the Prize, one cannot help but wonder if the fact that F was a member, vice-chairman, and eventually chairman of many years, of the Committee and that Domagk had saved F’s baby daughter’s life may have accelerated the process.

Russian Soldiers Ate My Great-Grandfather’s Brains

As a continuation of the recent series of posts on violence, family, brains, and eating,See Genius and Insanity, A Genuine Mystery, A Partial Explanation for a Genuine Mystery, and Human Sacrifice at the University. about a hundred years ago, the author’s great-grandfather—let’s call him S—was one the leading scientists in the fields of neurology and neuropathology.To judge from the accounts of family members and friends who knew him, S’s own brain was probably abnormal. At a scientific social event, he is reported to have turned to his wife and asked her why this colleague had suddenly walked away from them with such a ferocious mien on his face. His wife responded that this was probably because S had just called him an idiot to his face. To which S gravely nodded, yes, but it is true. This was apparently was typical of S and today he would probably be diagnosed with some high-functioning form of autism spectrum disorder.

Human Sacrifice at the University

The author traces his ancestry mostly to the Swedish town of Uppsala, near Stockholm. Uppsala is famous mainly for two things: its university and human sacrifice. These two facts are not unrelated.

TSA vs. My Two-Year Old Girl

This blog post merely recounts one more encounter with the Transportation Security Administration. Like so many other reports, it is merely an anecdote, rather than statistical proof of the thuggish ways of that agency. Yet, it strikes me as at least as cruel as several other incidents that recently have gained national attention, so it might be worth posting and reading.

A (Non-)Rejoinder to Prof. West on Home-Schooling

Prof. West does not hold unregulated home schooling in high regard (hat tip to Walter Olson's tweet, The Common Room's post, and Big Journalism's note):

The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.

Robin L. West, The Harms of Homeschooling, 29 Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 7, 10 (2009).

As (1) an atheist (2) living with an anything-but-submissive wife (3) in a pleasant home closer to 10,000 than to 1,000 square feet we own (4) in the wealthiest large county in the U.S. (5) in small, but not completely insignificant, part thanks to once upon a time having aced Prof. West's jurisprudence class and received a letter of recommendation from her, but who (6) nevertheless intends to home school his toddlers with his wife and without regulation, I am not quite sure how to respond to this.

PS to Prof. West: Rawls's maximin principle so does too imply an extreme form of risk aversion inconsistent with observed preferences!