February 18, 2025 You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation Luke Ford No sacred cows.

You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Luke Ford

Paul A. Offit MD wrote this 2021 book:

#1: Nature reveals its secrets slowly, grudgingly, and often with a human price. Scientists, clinicians, academicians, and pharmaceutical company executives must stay humble and respect the requisite learning curve that comes with new discoveries.
The development of COVID – 19 vaccines was often accompanied by a disturbing show of hubris. After completion of phase 1 trials, which examined small numbers of volunteers given different doses of vaccines, some company researchers and executives crowed. Moderna (fifteen patients), Pfizer (thirty – five patients), and AstraZeneca (ten patients) claimed that they could now make tens of millions of doses. These bold pronouncements ignored the likely surprises that lay ahead when a handful of recipients gives way to tens of millions of recipients. This lack of humility was especially concerning given that SARS – CoV – 2 had already shown itself to be an elusive, difficult to characterize virus that had provided a number of surprising clinical and pathological problems, not least of which was inflammation of the blood vessels that could damage any organ, including the brain and heart. No other virus had done what this virus was doing. Also, none of the strategies used by these three companies to make a SARS – CoV – 2 vaccine had ever been used to make a vaccine before. Surely, a learning curve lay ahead.
#2: Although federal guidelines lessen the chance of disasters, they will never eliminate them. Unanticipated tragedies are unpreventable, no matter how many regulations, training programs, fines, and penalties are put in place.
#3: Tragedies shouldn’t cause people to lose faith in the scientific endeavor. Science lurches forward in fits and starts, but it inevitably moves forward.
The retrovirus – caused – leukemia tragedy offers another lesson — one that is far more hopeful. In response to the leukemia disaster, researchers modified retrovirus vectors to include an “insulator” gene that eliminated the possibility that the virus could activate an oncogene. The protective gene worked. Researchers at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis were able to permanently correct severe immune deficiencies in ten children using this newer, safer retrovirus vector. Years later, none of these children had developed leukemia. Parents can now safely rely on these modified retroviruses to cure single – gene diseases. Yet another breakthrough built on tragedy.
During the Cutter Incident, when more than one hundred thousand children were inoculated with a polio vaccine that contained live poliovirus, tens of thousands were briefly paralyzed, hundreds were permanently paralyzed, and ten were killed. In response, federal regulators shut down the polio – vaccine program for several months until they could figure out what had gone so horribly wrong. When researchers finally did figure it out, better safety tests were put in place and the problem of polio caused by Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine disappeared.
A few months after the Cutter tragedy, polio vaccines were put back on the market. Now, parents had a choice to make. They could either trust that federal regulatory agencies had solved the problem, or they could wait a year or so to make sure that the problem didn’t recur. The choice to wait, however, wasn’t risk free. Poliovirus was still circulating in the community.
#6: Animal testing can be falsely reassuring.
#7: In the end, no matter how well – informed you are about a new technology, you’re gambling. But you’re gambling either way.

Posted in Medicine | Comments Off

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Luke Ford

Richard Rhodes writes in his 1995 book:

* [Lavrentiy] Beria was vulnerable. He had been assigned a vital project which had been given the highest priority of the state, but he lacked the knowledge necessary to judge its progress. He was at the mercy of scientists, intellectuals, people he viscerally distrusted. “With all of Beria’s apparent power,” writes a Russian historian, “he understood nothing about physics and he remained silent when the subject came around to uranium, plutonium, the separation of isotopes, ‘items’. . . . And the success of the work . . . also meant the destiny of the leader’s adviser himself, who bore personal responsibility for the creation of nuclear weapons under Stalin.” “At first all the problems were solved through Kurchatov,” says Yuli Khariton. “[Eventually] [Beria] was forced to pay attention to us.”
So Beria sought ways to decrease his vulnerability. He sent security officers to Japan to film the destruction at Nagasaki. He began developing a stable of “backup” scientists — with fewer Jews among them — whom he might call upon to replace the Kurchatov team if it proved to be treacherous.
* JUST WHEN THE SOVIET UNION began a crash program to build an atomic bomb, the American program “essentially came to a grinding halt,” Los Alamos experimental physicist Raemer Schreiber remembers. Schreiber, a handsome, confident man with warm blue eyes who grew up on an Oregon farm, had been one of the crew of scientists assigned to Tinian to assemble the first atomic bombs. Los Alamos “was stopped by the time I got back,” he says, “which was early in September [1945]. People were tidying up jobs. A few of the research projects were being finished up. We were about fifty percent staffed by the Special Engineer Detachment [enlisted men] and Navy officers and other military people. And, of course, all they wanted was out. A lot of the civilian staff were just as eager to go out and take their newfound knowledge and go back and start the programs at their universities. So there really wasn’t much useful work going on. . . . It was a very severe transition period.” 858
If the atomic bomb had shocked the Japanese, it had also shocked America. Materializing from secrecy to such conquering effect, it seemed a mysterious and almost supernatural force. It was a new fact dropped into the world — “a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature,” as I. I. Rabi called the first explosion at Trinity — and no one at first knew quite what to do with it. 859 The discovery of how to release nuclear energy was a technological revolution, most of all a revolution in war; like all revolutions, its meaning would not necessarily accord with hopes or theories or prophecies, but would reveal itself over time as individuals and governments maneuvered to exploit its energies and adapt it to their goals.
The scientists who worked on the bomb also materialized from secrecy and found it necessary to explain themselves.

Posted in Expertise, Nuclear, Soviet Union | Comments Off