sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
—William Shakespeare (1609)
Le jeunesse est une ivresse continuelle; c’est la fièvre de la raison.
—Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1665)
To Ann
toujours toujours là pour moi
Contents
1. Arrowsmith and CRISPR at the Marine Biological Laboratory
2. Ebola and the Cabinet of Dr. Proust
3. Zika, Kale, and Calligraphy: Ricky Jay and Matthias Buchinger
4. Ike on Orlando: “Every Gun Is a Theft”
6. Lupus and the Course of Empire
8. Apply Directly to Forehead: Holmes, Zola, and Hennapecia
9. Swift-Boating Darwin: Alternative and Complementary Science
10. Spinal Irritation and the Failure of Nerve
12. Dr. Doyle and the Case of the Guilty Gene
13. Swift-Boating “America the Beautiful”: Katharine Lee Bates and a Boston Marriage
14. Alice James and Rheumatic Gout
15. Free Radicals Can Kill You: Lavoisier and the Oxygen Revolution
16. Dr. Blackwell Returns from London
18. Welcome to America: Einstein’s Letter to the Dean
19. Modernism and the Hippocampus: Kandel’s Vienna
20. A Taste of the Oyster: Jan Vilcek’s Love and Science
21. Richard Dawkins Lights a Brief Candle in the Dark
22. Eugenics and the Immigrant: Rosalyn Yalow
23. Cortisone and the Burning Cross
24. Lewis Thomas and the Two Cultures
Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
—Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000)
NOT ONLY LOVE, as the Bard tells us, or youth, as the Duke suggests, produces fevers of reason. We’ve learned that the fevers of Zika and Ebola can sear the mind; we’ve also learned that reason becomes toast when presidential Tweets go viral at dawn. Fevers of reason require treatment based on facts not fancy, brains not bravado.
Happily enough, messages of cool reason can also go viral, and at their best, inform and command. That’s especially true of scientific papers that introduce notions like the helical structure of DNA. To become viable, and go viral in turn, their progeny must survive the birth pangs of test, retest, and peer review. When a tested notion reaches adolescence, we call it a hypothesis (DNA makes RNA makes protein). When a hypothesis reaches maturity it becomes a theory (relativity) and, with time, becomes a law (gravity).
No such direct path for an essay. While the word comes from the French essai, a “test, trial, or experiment,” essays don’t require
