Circulating The Truth: Harvey vs. Galen & Rush.

Posted on | November 10, 2025 | 9 Comments

Galen’s Circulation

Mike Magee

“I have found bleeding to be useful, not only in cases where the pulse was full and quick, but where it was slow and tense.” That was the sage advise Benjamin Rush offered to fellow clinicians in the middle of the Yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1796.

Rush’s ignorance on first glance is both historic and incomprehensible in that he was relying on the teachings of Galen (Aelius Galens/129 AD -216 AD), who himself had incorporated the biases of Hippocrates and Aristotle based on their belief that circulation involved the four bodily fluids –  blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. All of the above they believed could overwhelm the body by offering “too much blood.”.

To make matters worse, Rush had had 165 years to absorb the incontrovertible findings of William Harvey and his 1628 landmark publication Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanquinis in Animalibus (Anatomic Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) which exposed Galen’s classic assertions as wrong on multiple counts.

Galen was born in Pergamum, Asia Minor (present day Turkey) when the Roman Empire was in full swing. He began studying medicine at age 16, and 12 years later was awarded with the active post of “Surgeon to the Gladiators.” At age 33, he was “Physician to the Emperor.”

He was fascinated by human anatomy but legally prohibited from human cadaver studies. Instead he focused on dead and living animals. At the core, Galen was obsessed with nutrition, or more specifically how the food one ingested was distributed to the human flesh. He believed food was transformed to blood, and then somehow transformed via the liver into flesh.

Galen spent a great deal of time observing species in varying distress, and deduced:

1. The heart beat.
2. Breathing was essential for life.
3. A warm body was good. A dead body went cold.
4. Hearts had valves.
5. Thick arteries and thinner veins connected to the heart and carried different color blood.

All true. But then he got the circulatory system wrong. He described two disconnected tracks. The first path connected liver, veins and right heart, and delivered processed food to various parts of the body. The second path connected left heart, lung, and arteries and delivered cooling air.

The Roman Empire lasted another quarter century after Galen’s death and then collapsed giving way to the century-long Dark Ages (lasting till 1400). In the Latin West, the Church controlled everything and embedded Galen’s beliefs in their scripture. But the Islamic and Byzantium worlds continued to explore and experiment and move forward. For example, in 1240, an Arab polymath from Damascus, Ibn al‐Nafis, described with accuracy the form and function of pulmonary circulation. 

Three hundred years later, in 1547, that Arab publication was translated into Latin. By then, the Renaissance was underway in Italy, led by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci who correctly noted that “the heart is a vessel made of thick muscle, vivified and nourished by artery and vein as are other muscles.” Others piled on proving that the heart valves allowed blood flow in only one direction; that blue blood was pumped from the right ventricle into the lungs and returned to the left heart bright red; and that the “invisible pores” that Galen theorized connected right and left ventricles providing lively and spirited air didn’t exist.

All of the above was available to 19-year old William Harvey when he graduated in 1547 from university at Padua, Italy. At the time, Galileo occupied the chair of mathematics at the university. Harvey taught and continued his studies there before returning to England to become Assistant Physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1604. A decade later, he received a lifetime appointment as Lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians in 1615. And thirteen years after that, he set Galen straight in his monumental 72-page de Motu Cordis publication.

Where Galen saw straight lines, Harvey saw “circular motions” which preserved and carried blood in perpetuity. “One action of the heart is the transmission of the blood and its distribution, by means of the arteries, to the very extremities of the body,” he wrote.

Harvey had access to human cadavers. After calculating the volume of blood ejected by the left ventricle, and the number of beats, he proved that “it is matter of necessity that the blood perform a circuit, that it return to whence it set out.” That was because, by his calculations, unless blood recirculated, you would need to create 540 pounds of blood per hour to keep the system full

Harvey loved ligatures and applied them liberally to arteries and veins in fish, snakes, dogs, men and more. He also probed venous valves and realized that blood was only able to flow one way in veins. From these and other observations, he saw the heart as mirroring industrial force pumps that were common in his day, and systole as the driver of circulation. 

The venous system carried blood back to the right heart which delivered its goods to the lungs for (still not understood) oxygenation. That refreshed blood was then delivered to the left heart for forceful arterial distribution – thus a virtuous cycle. The remaining mystery of peripheral blood transport from tiny distal arterial branches to venous counterparts was resolved when Marcello Malpighi discovered and described capillaries in frog lungs in 1661, four years after Harvey’s death.

Harvey was prepared and anxious to challenge a centuries old status-quo. Two decades after publishing de Motu, his 1649 fighting words read, “For the concept of a circuit of the blood does not destroy, but rather advances traditional medicine.” Rene Descartes, the philosopher apparently agreed. He saw Harvey’s idea of the heart as a pump as valid, drawing comparisons to new combustion engines which were both “mechanistic and vitalistic” sources of life and energy.

And yet 250 years later, Benjamin Rush was pushing not only blood letting and cathartics in moribund patients, but babbling on about “the four humors – blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile” – Galen’s four best friends. So why did it take so long for Harvey’s vision to overtake Galen’s? 

Three reasons: 1. Galen’s explanation of circulation was internally consistent, providing a role and purpose for what was visible at the time, and invisible. 2. Galen was careful not to challenge Aristotle or Hippocrates, agreeing that “the heat of the body is innate and inexorably linked to life and the soul.” 3. In largely endorsing Galen’s views, the Church made it a sacrilege to challenge the doctrine. Direct examination of human cadavers, in opposition to church doctrine, lent permission to challenge accepted scientific doctrine.

The New Face of Eugenics?

Posted on | November 4, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee MD

Few can possibly be surprised that, in the age of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, “Designer Babies” (among the billionaire tech crowd and their followers) are all the rage.

Seven years ago, He Jiankui, a gene editing scientist from China, took three human embryos and used Crispr technology to design in immunity from HIV. The Chinese government reaction was immediate. They charged Jiankul with illegal medical practices” and sent him to jail for three years.

But inside Peter Thiel’s “genius factory,” you can find incubating former Thiel Fellows – “the crazy smart youth paid by Peter Thiel to double down on entrepreneurship instead of school.” Begun in 2010, he set out to pay $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 to forge school and move to San Francisco to pursue their dreams.

In 2015, one Chinese immigrant to Canada landed a Fellow position. Her name is Cathy Tie. Now a decade later, she’s all grown up, and in the news as CEO of Manhattan Genomics, whose raison d’etre is “to end genetic disease and alleviate human suffering by fixing harmful mutations at the embryo stage.”

Tie says not to worry her intent is “disease correction, not enhancement.” Clearly she does not shy away from controversy. In the “stranger than fiction” category, it appears that she was romantically involved with He Jiankul in 2025 (even possibly married), but blocked form joining him in her birthplace of China in May, 2025, by the government despite her possessing a valid 10-year visa.

IVF professionals are slowing leaning into genetic redesign as preimplantation embryo screening for disease like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell become routine. But experts like Berkeley’s Molecular Therapeutics professor Fyodor Urnov disagree. He sees “quasi-eugenics” rearing its ugly head again in the service of elite self interest. In his words, “Why is money being poured into this? Because at the end of the day, those who have money want to ‘improve’ their babies.” 

In March, 2025, He Jiankul drew 9.7 million views in a X tweet that began “Human will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution.”  Seven days later, he topped that with 13.7 million views of  “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.” Perhaps Fyodor has a firmer grip than He on American history when it comes to the fallout of Darwinism even before the advent of AI.

In 1872, it all began innocently enough with Charles Darwin’s publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He became the first scientist to use photographic images to “document the expressive spectrum of the face” in a publication. Typing individuals through their images and appearance “was a striking development for clinicians.”

Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, a statistician, took his cousin’s data and synthesized “identity deviation” and “reverse-engineered” what he considered the “ideal type” of human, “an insidious form of human scrutiny” that would become Eugenics ( from the Greek word, “eugenes” – meaning “well born”).  Expansion throughout academia rapidly followed, and validation by our legal system helped spread and cement the movement to all kinds of “imperfection”, with sanitized human labels like “mental disability” and “moral delinquency.” Justice and sanity did catch up eventually, but it took decades, and that was before AI and neural networks. 

What if Galton had had Gemini Ultra to advance the cause of genetic perfection? Complicating our future further, say experts, is the fact that generative AI with its “deep neural networks is currently a self-training, opaque ‘black box’…incapable of explaining the reasoning that led to its conclusion…Becoming more autonomous with each improvement, the algorithms by which the technology operates become less intelligible to users and even the developers who originally programmed the technology.” Add to this, an expanded (and potentially lucrative) focus on “virtual cells.” A contest for the best AI model of the H1 human stem cell line was just announced on June 26, 2025.

Laissez-faire as a social policy doesn’t seem to work well at the crossroads of genetics and technology. Useful, even groundbreaking discoveries, are likely on the AI horizon. But profit seeking entrepreneurs, in total, will likely further undermine equity and diversity and add cost while further complicating our already compromised experiment in democracy and self-governance.

 

What Is The Best Science Experiment Ever Done?

Posted on | October 28, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Allan Franklin PhD, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Colorado, cued up the question above in his acclaimed 2016 book “What Makes a Good Experiment.” He first addressed that question in a 1981 article in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. The general bias at the time was that science experiments had but one purpose – to test theories. But Franklin argued that “experiments can actually play a lot of different roles in science—they can, for example, investigate a subject for which a theory does not exist, help to articulate an existing theory, call for a new theory, or correct incorrect or misinterpreted results.”

One historic experiment Franklin placed at the top of his greatness list was Gregor Mendel’s famous 1856 pea experiment. The series of actions and observations spread out over a seven year period at the Augustinian St. Thomas Abbey in Brno (Brünn), Margraviate of Moravia where Mendel was a Catholic priest. 

He knew more than a little about soils and plants having grown up on a farm owned by his family for 130 year. But his family was under financial pressure in his youth, and his interest in becoming a monk lay, in part, on managing a “perpetual anxiety about a means of livelihood.”

He was much more than a journeyman gardener. He was an expansive thinker with a special focus on biology and mathematics. And when it came to natural science, he didn’t lean on the traditional creation theology as much as hard core measurements, facts, and concrete deductions. It was these qualities that led to his fascination with a 10,000 year old cultivated crop that thrived in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East – the humble pea.

Mendel was interested in charting and understanding stable variants of plants in successive generations. He choose the pea because it was a well-known and catalogue available seed at the time with easily distinguishable characteristics. He decided to concentrate on seven of these traits – plant height, pod shape, pod color, seed shape, seed color, flower position, and flower color. Between 1856 and 1863 he meticulously catalogued the progress of over 28,000 plants.

 The results filled volumes of personal booklets, ultimately leading to a 40-page manual that earned him the title of “father of modern genetics” many years after his death. The observations were simple and concrete. For example, in focusing on seed color (yellow or green pea), he demonstrated that crossbreeding one yellow pea parent with one green pea parent always produced yellow pea producing children in the first generation. But in the second generation their offspring were always three yellow and one green. The same type of variation reappeared with other phenotypic traits like violet vs. white flower color.

From this, Mendel deduced that some yet to be identified biologic controllers, paired as either “dominant” or “recessive,” were directing phenotypic appearance of each plants trait. Two dominants or one dominant and one recessive pairing delivered a yellow pea in generation two. But the third generation included  two recessives as an option, and therefore one of the four progeny was the recssive green pea.  These invisible factors were finally defined in April, 2025, and published this year in Nature, when the full genome and all the rare controlling alleles of the humble pea were finally revealed. Image Source.

Mendel understood broadly the implications of his findings, published in 1866. But his work and insights were cited only three times in the next 35 years, and seen only as a specialized text on hybridization. Mendel alone seemed to fully understand the implications of his work. He recognized that his observations of quantitative and predictive appearance of certain phenotypic markers implied an as yet hidden biologic driver.

In 1924, three decades after his death, the scientific community acknowledged that his research was proof positive of the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment that would ultimately underpin “Mendel’s Laws if Inheritance.” But another century would pass before experts were finally able to conclusively identify the multiple genes and complex genotype that delivered Mendel’s phenotypic findings in full.

As for Mendel’s contemporary, Charles Darwin, he either was unaware or ignored Mendel’s findings. His theories of branching patterns of evolution, natural selection occurring over millennia, and selective breeding derived from observations and careful specimen collection and notation on a 5-year voyage on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. His 1859 book On the Origin of Species omitted explicit discussion of human origins and sexual selection. 

The 350 page work ends with this paragraph: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Thus the label “Evolution” enters common vernacular. Darwin died on April 19, 1882, two years before Mendel. Although an agnostic, the British religious community had made peace with Darwin who by then was considered the greatest scientist of his era, and was buried a hero in Westminster Abbey close to the grave of Sir Issac Newton with thousands in attendance.

As for Mendel, he was buried at the Augustinian tomb at today’s Central Cemetery in Brno. According to s final words, he had few regrets. He seemed to understand that time would have to pass before his grand experiment could be understood, and its results explained in their entirety. It’s doubtful he could have predicted that might take 170 years. 

Gregor Mendel (top row, 2nd from left) and his fellow Monks.

When he first reported his results, he said:

“It requires indeed some courage to undertake a labor of such far-reaching extent; this appears, however, to be the only right way by which we can finally reach the solution of a question the importance of which cannot be overestimated in connection with the history of the evolution of organic forms. The paper now presented records the results of such a detailed experiment…. Whether the plan upon which the separate experiments were conducted and carried out was the best suited to attain the desired end is left to the friendly decision of the reader.”

In 1968, Swedish geneticist, Ake Gustafsson, in an article titled, “The Life of Gregor Johann Mendel: Tragic or Not?” summed it up well: “This is the life of Gregor Johann Mendel—reasonably long, kind, charming, great. His was a good heart. His is an imperishable fame.”

Resistance Meets Convergence – and Sorkin’s “1929”

Posted on | October 20, 2025 | 1 Comment

 

Mike Magee

This past weekend, over 7 million Americans joyfully and publicly flexed their democratic muscles in a dramatic push back on authoritarianism summed up in two words, “NO KINGS.”

Resistance is slowly meeting convergence, as frustration is fueling activism to countermand ICE offenses, federal worker decapitations, soldiers invading our own cities, richy-rich getting even richer, and ACA premiums doubling overnight as MAGA loyalists suddenly discover they are the ones paying for tariffs. And that was before a gapping hole was torn this week in our nation’s White House.

Synergy is at work here, a virtuous wave of self-reinforcing anxiety set to explode at some uncertain (but certain) future date. And events like this weekend’s mass demonstrations are more than resistance. They are gathering points for ideas, and energy plumes fueling confidence, and (no longer) silent screams that “You are not alone. We are with you. We can do this.”

People are looking backwards and forwards for strategies to take back our democracy. Take for example the much heralded release of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s latest book “1929.” Reviewers are in agreement that the characters Sorkin reveals make for a story as gripping and movie-treatment ready as his former success “Too Big To Fail.” Where they disagree is whether he went far enough to draw analogies between that century old disaster and current times. 

In his own words, Sorkin seems to want to go there, labeling his own effort “a fable of private greed courting public disaster” so that “each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history, and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again.” And in his epilogue: “Ultimately, the story of 1929 is not about rates or regulation….It is about something far more enduring: human nature.”

Back in 1929, financial calamity carried with it political fallout. And you can tell, experts and every day citizens have a case of the nerves. They increasingly know that something’s not right, and something’s coming around the bend.

In reviewing Sorkin’s book, Zachary D. Carter, author of “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes,” gave this summary in the Harvard Business Review: “There is no law of nature that irresistibly converts greed into progress over time. The terms of market fairness and exchange are inherently political rules, and it matters a great deal whether the capital development of the country is dependent on rank market manipulation and frenzied hyper-leveraged gambling. There are surely important lessons for our current moment in Sorkin’s book; it is not clear he knows what they are.”

Sorkin explains himself a bit to the Guardian columnist Martin Pengully, saying: “One of the lessons of writing Too Big to Fail was, we talk about business and the economy oftentimes in big numbers and structures and systems, but it really is ultimately about people and the decisions they make. So I thought: ‘Maybe there’s an opening to write a book like that.’”

I was thinking of that opening – the one filled with real people with real stories and real lives when I encountered the lady above at the “No Kings” rally in Hartford, CT this week. As you can see, she was carrying a sign that read “MY DAD FOUGHT FACISM IN WW II AND WAS A POW. NOW I MARCH TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY.”

We compared notes, and as it turns out, my father and her’s had crossed each other’s paths back then. Both arrived in Tunisia in the early Spring of 1944. From there, they were shipped  to Southern Italy, and participated in the invasion of Southern France in August, 1944, (after D-Day). But then their paths diverged. Her Dad was captured and survived 9 months in a Nazi POW camp, and my Dad treated and triaged casualties at the front lines in France and Germany as a MASH doctor. Her presence reminded me, and I’m sure many others in the crowd, that we too have a role to play, to ensure that their past sacrifices were not in vain. 

Thinking about Sorkin’s messaging later that day, it occurred to me that maybe the real message of “1929” was what followed shortly after, with the election of FDR and the New Deal.

His signature legislation, the Social Security Act massively funded state and local public health services. From maternal and child welfare services to tuberculosis and venereal disease control, health and wellness were a priority. At the same time, the federal health focus emphasized new hospitals, improved water and sewer systems, and stood up the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act which required for the first time that drugs be demonstrated to be both safe and effective before they were brought to market.

Were there bumps along the road? Of course. For example, the Supreme Court under Justice Charles Evans Hughes was dominated by aging conservative Justices who were intent on over turning The Social Security Act. FDR responded by moving to rebalance the Court by expanding its numbers. As Cornell legal experts explain, “After his landslide reelection to a second term as president, FDR proposed to expand the Supreme Court by adding one new justice for every sitting justice over the age of seventy. This scheme was defeated in Congress, but in his next three terms as president FDR appointed all the members of the Supreme Court, and these new justices were much more aligned with his economic reforms.”

Many of the signs this weekend focused on the Administrations attempts to slash Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. Others reinforced women’s control over there own health care choices, with more that a few red and white “hooded Handmaidens in attendance. That is why it is fascinating to recall where FDR placed a great deal of emphasis in addressing a nationwide Depression – public and population health . 

My new found friend’s father returned, changed but alive from that POW camp. He left behind a vanquished enemy and millions of desperate civilians. In the re-build of Germany under the Marshall Plan, we elected to start with a health plan – in part because we recognized (as FDR had during his 1st Term) that all other social determinants – justice, housing, nutrition, education, clean air and water, transportation, safety and security – would be enhanced in the process.

We understood that this 1948 infusion of what would today amount to $128 billion would engender trust, improve health and productivity, and process fear and worry which might otherwise undermine the establishment of a civil society and stable democracy. In a Rand Corporation post-mortem on nation building some decades later, scholars remarked that, “Nation-building efforts cannot be successful unless adequate attention is paid to the health of the population.”

We as American citizens essentially face a challenge of similar magnitude today. In rejecting Trump, we are battling what Sorkin describes “a fable of private greed courting public disaster.” But what is becoming clear is that the most likely outcome will be an invigorated democracy with reengineered and refined health services at its very core.

Does Action Lead To Hope, or Hope Lead To Action? Lessons from HIV and Beyond.

Posted on | October 14, 2025 | 7 Comments

Mike Magee

In this morning’s New York Times, David Leonhardt, editorial director of New York Times Opinion, interviews former Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg on the subject of Rebuilding America.

Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, and their two children recently moved from South Bend, Indiana to Chasten’s home town in Traverse, Michigan. Extended family presence played a role in the decision, and Pete’s mom moved there too. But the adjustment hasn’t been major. As Buttigieg said, “It’s definitely more rural than where I grew up, but also very Midwestern in ways that make me feel right at home.”

Politically, the new home is in a rural, 50-50 county, but not unlike where Pete grew up. As he explained it, “Where I grew up, people might have Trump yard signs. Here, they have Trump flags on flagpoles.” As for his new neighbors, he notes that its nothing like his online critics. He recalls a neighbor approaching him at the local Target to say “I don’t share your politics, but it’s nice running into you.”

These days, Pete spends a fair amount of time reflecting on how to accomplish a “shared national future.” Looking in the rear view mirror, as a gay man who came of age when HIV/AIDS was raging, he is now 43 and takes the long view. He was born 6 months after the first mention of HIV in a weekly CDC Morbidity & Mortality Report on June 5, 1981.

It shaped his view of America, and the possibilities our our common futures. As he shared, “There’s a trajectory here that shows enormous change can happen when you’re willing to play out that strategy over the long term. What is inspiring about the gay equality movement — not just to somebody who benefits from it, but that it didn’t just take something from being unpopular to being popular. It took ideas that were preposterous for one generation and made them consensus for the next generation. That’s the level of ambition we ought to have.” 

Leonhardt’s final question is “How would you encourage people to find some sense of hope that actually, some of our very deep problems are solvable…”

And Pete’s reply, “I’ve heard it said that hope is the consequence of action more than its cause, and that’s something I try to think about a lot in this moment. Instead of waiting around for hope, we actually have an obligation — a responsibility — to build hope, and that hope is the result of what we do in this moment. That’s how I think about the present.”

His positioning the challenge as a strategic choice (action creating hope, or hope for corrective action) caught my eye. In 2002. I published “The Book of Choices”.   The premise of this book is that our lives are simply an accumulation of the thousands of decisions, large and small, that we make every day. The Book of Choices consists of 77 short chapters, each on a fundamental life choice. The chapter consists of a meditation illuminating the nature of that choice, followed by carefully selected quotations from history’s greatest thinkers, teachers, and doers. The digital book is now available free of charge on HealthCommentary.org under the banner, Caring Culture.

Earlier today, in preparation for a Zoom lecture to Dr. David Myers class on Health Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins, I was looking though this content, triggered by an inquiry from one of Dr. Myers’  students who had accessed the Book of Choices online.

Two of the 77 categories are “Action vs. Inaction,” and “Hope vs. Despair.”  Most of the commentators (past and present) are allied with Pete Buttigieg. Here they are for your reflection:

ACTION vs. INACTION

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F. Kennedy

I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain.
Gandhi

If a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it
Edgar Watson Howe

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all, try something
Franklin D. Roosevelt

There comes a time when you’ve got to say, “Let’s get off our asses and go…” I have always found that if I move with 75 percent or more of the facts I usually never regret it. It’s the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.
Lee Iacocca

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers

He who is outside the door has already a good part of his journey behind him.
Dutch Proverb

If deeds are wanting, all words appear mere vanity and emptiness.
Greek Proverb

After all is said and done, more is said than done.
Anon.

If you want a thing done, go – if not, send.
Benjamin Franklin

I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.
Tallulah Bankhead

‘Mean to’ don’t pick no cotton.
Anon.

Deliberate often – decide once.
Latin proverb

It is the characteristic excellence of a strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

HOPE vs. DESPAIR

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest.
Alexander Pope

Even in the deepest sinking there is the hidden purpose of an ultimate rising. Thus it is for all men, from none is the source of light withheld unless he himself withdraws from it. Therefore the most important thing is not to despair.
Hasidic Saying

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Charles A. Beard

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
Lin Yutang

It has never been, and never will be, easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they lead to the same destination.
Marion Zimmer Bradley

Even the cry from the depths is an affirmation: why cry if there is no hint of hope of hearing?
Martin Marty

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it
Helen Keller 

In the face of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with hope.
Bernie S. Siegel, M.D. 

Still round the corner there may wait,
A new road, or a secret gate
J. R. R. Tolkein

Deep in their roots,
All flowers keep the light
Theodore Roethke 

When fear is excessive it can make many a man despair.
Saint Thomas Aquinas

Nobel vs. RFK Jr: No Contest.

Posted on | October 8, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

With the announcement of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last week, the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) took an understandable victory lap, stating: “This Nobel Prize demonstrates how immunology is central to medicine and human health. The ability to harness, modulate, or restrain immune responses holds promise across a vast range of diseases — from autoimmune conditions to cancer, allergies, infectious disease, and beyond.”

This year’s award went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi, and it couldn’t have come at a better time as our nation’s scientific community and their governmental, academic and corporate science leaders push back against vaccine skeptic RFK Jr.

As the AAI proudly exclaims, “Since 1901, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 27 AAI members for their innovation and achievements in immunology and related disciplines.” Make that 28 with the addition of Dr. Sakaguchi, a Distinguished Fellow of AAI.

The field of Immunology and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine have grown side by side over the past century.

Immunity has Latin roots from the word immunitas which in Roman times was offered to denote exemption from the burden of taxation to worthy citizens by their Emperor.  Protection from disease is a bit more complicated than that and offers our White Blood Cells (WBCs) a starring role. These cells are produced in the bone marrow, then bivouacked to the fetal thymus for instruction on how to attack only invaders, but spare our own healthy cells.

WBC’s are organized in specialized divisions. WBC neutrophils engulf bacterial, fungi, and fungi as immediate first responders. Monocyte macrophages are an additional first line of defense, literally gobbling and digesting bacteria and damaged cells through a process called “phagocytosis.” B-cells produce specific proteins called antibodies, designed to learn and remember specific invaders chemical make-up or “antigen.” They can ID offenders quickly and neutralize target bacteria, toxins, and viruses. And T-cells are specially designed to go after viruses hidden within the human cells themselves.

The first ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to German scientist, Emil von Behring, eleven years after he demonstrated “passive immunity.” He was able to isolate poisons or toxins derived from tetanus and diphtheria microorganisms, inject them into lab animals, and subsequently prove that the animals were now “protected” from tetanus and diphtheria infection. These antitoxins, liberally employed in New York City, where diphtheria was the major killer of infants, quickly ended that sad epidemic.

The body’s inner defense system began to reveal its mysteries in the early 1900s. Brussel scientist Jules Bordet, while studying the bacteria Anthrax, was able to not only identified protein antibodies in response to anthrax infection, but also a series of companion proteins.  This cascade of proteins linked to the antibodies enhanced their bacterial killing power. In 1919 Bordet received his Nobel Prize for the discovery of a series of “complement” proteins, which when activated help antibodies “drill holes” through bacterial cell walls and destroy them.

Victories against certain pathogens were hard fought. In the case of poliovirus, which had a predilection to invade motor neurons, especially in children, and cause paralysis, it required a remarkable collaboration between government, academic medical researchers and local community based doctors and nurses to ultimately succeed. The effort involved simultaneous testing in children of two very different vaccines. 

Current vaccine skeptics like RFK Jr. argue against historic facts. One need only to examine graphs of annual case loads for diseases like diphtheria and polio, before and after the introduction of vaccines, to appreciate the dramatic preservation of life that resulted from intentional but safe exposure to killed or attenuated vaccines.

In this same era, scientific theorists like UK scientist Nils Jerne. were proven right. But it took three decades for the scientific community to agree. His 1984 Nobel Prize read, “He asserted that all kinds of antibodies already have developed during the fetus stage and that the immune system functions through selection. In 1971, he proved that lymphocytes teach themselves to recognize the body’s own substances in the thymus gland… An immunological reaction arises when an antigen disturbs the system’s equilibrium.”

By then, those Jerne’s WBCs had been termed “B lymphocytes” by an Australian scientist named Macfarlane Burnet, a 1960 Nobel laureate, who also saw antibodies already established in the fetus. These individuals were part of a long tradition of medical science imagineers. For example, Robert Koch’s main assistant was Paul Ehrlich, who imagined the inner workings of the cell this way, “In his eyes, cells were surrounded by tiny spike-like molecular structures, or ‘side-chains’, as he called them, and that these were responsible for trapping nutrients and other chemicals, and for drawing them inside the cell.”

 The “side chains” were in fact antibodies, large protein molecules made up of two long and two short chains. It was later proven that roughly 80% of the four chains are identical in all antibodies. The remaining 20% varies, forming unique antigen bonding sites for each and every antigen. Almost immediately scientists began to wonder whether they could reconfigure these large proteins to create “monoclonal antibodies” to fight cancers like melanoma.

Imagination has occasionally carried the day. But more often direct problem solving uncovers answers. That was the case when French scientist, Jean Dausset described an “HLA (human leucocyte antigen) fingerprint.” One question always leads to another. In this case, “Why do HLAs exist?” What was eventually uncovered was that certain microorganisms (viruses) take up residence inside human cells gaining protected status.

 To deal with the problem, humans possess a specialized WBC – termed “T-cell.” But for the T-cell to destroy an intracellular virus, it must “recognize and respond” to two messaging signals. First, the virus’s antigen. Second, a permissive signal that informs that the virus is housed in a host cell that deserves preservation. The fingerprint HLA is that signal.

Which brings us back to the most recent Nobel award last week for discoveries that the committee labeled as “fundamental.”  How so?  In the 1980’s Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi proved that humans have a backup system to prevent errant self-attacks – specialized “regulatory T cells” that develop in the thymus after birth in the first few weeks of life. It then took two more decades (in 2001) for Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell to identify the gene (FOXP3) responsible for creating “regulatory T-cells.” No gene – no regulatory T-cells.

Why is this important? Two reasons:

1. Turns out, cancers have a nasty habit of surrounding themselves with regulatory T-cells that protect them from an immune system that would otherwise eliminate them. New drugs may be able to selectively turn off  the FOXP3 gene and allow appropriate destruction of these cancer cells by the bodies regular T-cells.
2. On the flip side, autoimmune diseases (where the body turns on itself) appear to be fueled by the absence of effective FOXP3 gene enabled “regulatory T-cells. New drugs geared to turn on the gene and its critical cells may shut down the self-destructive process.

Immunology is a mysterious, complex, and constantly evolving field of study. Host and predators (including everything from a microorganism invader to a roque cancer cell, to a wooden splinter left unaddressed) could be fatal. But to respond the host must first identify the threat, and activate a specific and effective response, without inadvertently injuring the host itself. As our understanding has grown, harnessing the immune system to chase down metastatic cancer cells, or suppress a deadly rejection of a transplanted organ, or self-modify to avoid auto-immune destruction are clearly within our grasp in the not too distant future.

So to sum it all up, science is a process and RFK Jr. is ill-equipped to referee it.

“If Men Were Angels . . .”

Posted on | October 5, 2025 | 1 Comment

On “the problem of liberty and order in constitutional government.”

The Federalist – 51st Paper (1788):

“But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither internal or external controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions [a well constructed constitution].”
–  James Madison

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