Koop’s Ghost of Christmas Past Haunts RFK Jr.

Posted on | December 8, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

The Ghost of Christmas Past, in the form of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, has returned this season to torture one RFK Jr who refuses to fully share life saving vaccines with children. In the encounter, the ghostly Koop reviews a time 37 years ago when citizens came together to celebrate separating scientific fact from fiction with life-saving effects.

Beginning in 1988, the United States, along with the rest of the world, had formally acknowledged and celebrated World AIDS Day on December 1st each year – that is until 2025. At President’s Trump’s direction the State Department, and with HHS support, turned their back on an inconvenient truth – the Republican early record on HIV/AIDS. Let’s channel the truth-telling Surgeon General from Christmas past and remember this telling story.

On June 5, 1981, the CDC reported 6 cases of Pneumocystis carinii associated with a strange immune deficiency disorder in California men. Drs. Michael Gottlieb and Joel Weismann, infectious disease experts who delivered care routinely for members of the gay population in Los Angeles, had alerted the CDC. Inside the organization, there was a debate on how best to report this new illness in gay men.

The vehicle that the CDC chose was a weekly report called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or MMWR. So as not to offend, the decision was made to post the new finding, not on page 1, but on page 2, with no mention of homosexuality in the title. Almost no one noticed.

On April 13, 1982, nine months after the initial alert, Senator Henry Waxman held the first Congressional hearings on the growing epidemic. The CDC testified that tens of thousands were likely already infected. On September 24, 1982, the condition would for the first time carry the label, AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The new Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop’s focus at the time, along with the vast majority of public health leaders across the nation, was not on a new emerging infectious disease, but rather on the nation’s chronic disease burden, especially cardiovascular disease and cancer being fed by the post-war explosion of tobacco use. He had already surmised that the power of his position lie in communications and advocacy.

One month after his swearing in, he appeared on a panel to release a typically boring Surgeon General update report on tobacco. He was not intended to have a big role. When Koop rose to deliver what all thought would be brief, inconsequential remarks, he wasted no time disintegrating the lobbyist organization, the Tobacco Institute. For print journalists in the audience, he was clear, concise and quotable. For broadcast journalists, he was a dream come true – tall, erect with his Mennonite beard, in a dark suit with bow tie, exuding a combination of extreme confidence and legitimacy mixed with “don’t mess with me” swagger.

As Koop would later say, after that, “I began to be quoted as an authority. And the press from that time on was all on my side… I made snowballs and they threw ‘em.” The other thing that Koop noticed early was that the Reagan Administration didn’t shut him down. That was surprising since Koop’s major supporter in a year long confirmation battle (the AMA opposed his appointment) was NC arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms.

Add to Jesse’s wrath, R.J. Reynold’s CEO, Edward Horrigan, complained directly to Reagan about Koop’s “increasingly shrill preachments. Cigarette consumption in the US was in free fall. By 1987, 40 states would have laws banning smoking in public places; 33 states had bans in public transportation; and 17 already had eliminated workplace smoking.

Still Reagan didn’t shut him down. Now everyone from public schools to medical groups to women’s associations to civic enterprises wanted him. And beginning in late 1982, he arrived in full regalia, in a magnificent Public Health Service, Vice-Admiral’s uniform with ribbons and epaulettes. And his aide, also in uniform, always carried with him a bag of buttons for distribution which read, “The Surgeon General personally asked me to quit smoking.”

But in the most pressing public health challenge of the day, HIV/AIDS, the department was AWOL. Koop was actively sidelined by top Administration officials. Not surprisingly, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Everyone was feeling the heat, including the CDC, who removed funding for AIDS education after being accused of promoting sodomy by conservatives.

As more and more people died – now not only gays, but also heterosexuals, hemophiliacs, drug users, newborns of infected mothers – Reagan’s silence became deafening. To relieve the pressure, in 1986, the President finally freed Koop’s hands and directed him to coordinate a report on AIDS for the American public.

In October, 1986, Reagan first uttered the word, AIDS. By then, over 16,000 Americans were already dead. Inside his Administration, Reagan gave voice earlier to people like Education Secretary Bill Bennett who discouraged providing AIDS information in schools and Domestic Policy Adviser and Christian evangeliser Gary Bauer, who Koop said, was “my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the President. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”

On May 31, 1987, Reagan, at the urging of his wife Nancy and their friend and actress Elizabeth Taylor, delivered his first major address on the topic at the American Foundation for AIDS Research event. It was six years late. 21,000 Americans were now dead, and 36,000 more lived with a diagnosis of the disease.

His prior inaction could not be blamed on ignorance or lack of exposure. Koop had done his best to keep the President informed. But the doors of the White House remained wide open to the Christian Conservative elite. Policies were being pushed, as promised, to reinstitute traditional Judeo-Christian values. All the while, a pandemic was raging, which some believed was “the hand of God at work”. And yet, there was the wild card. Koop, now self proclaimed the “Nation’s Doctor”, had evolved.

A critical turning point for the pediatric surgeon turned Surgeon General had come earlier, on December 17,1984, when a young hemophiliac from Kokomo, Indiana, undergoing a partial lung removal for severe consolidated pneumonia, was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. His name was Ryan White. He was 14 years old at the time. He became infected while receiving an infusion of a blood derivative, Factor VIII, for his hemophilia. When he was cleared to return to school, 50 teachers and over a third of the parents of students from his school signed a petition asking that his attendance be barred.

Koop clearly understood that continued inaction on his part would be unacceptable. This was what could happen when scientific fact and fictions deliberately distorted. In the absence of his leadership and the provision of proper health education, ignorance and prejudice would rein supreme.

Ryan White (after the state’s health commissioner and the New England Journal of Medicine reinforced that the child’s disease could not be spread by casual contact) was readmitted to school in April, 1985. He would die 5 years later, and legislation, in his name, would open up much needed federal funding to care for those affected by the disease.

By then, President Reagan, feeling the pressure, finally did direct Koop to create a report, he was more than prepared to respond. He interviewed AIDS activists, representatives from the medical and hospital associations, Christian fundamentalists, and politicians from both sides of the aisle. Few knew fully what he was up to. One exception was his colleague and personal physician at the National Institute of Health, Infectious Disease specialist, Tony Fauci, who headed up the AIDS Research effort for the NIH.

Fauci had a troubled history with AIDS activists. This dated back to a serious misstep by him on May 6, 1983. On that date, the Journal of the American Medical Association generated a press release, liberally quoting Fauci, titled “Evidence Suggests Household Contact May Transmit AID’s”. In the piece, the NIH scientist says, “We are witnessing at the present time the evolution of a new disease process of unknown etiology with a mortality of at least 50% and possibly as high as 75% to 100% with the doubling of the number of patients afflicted every six months…If routine close contact can spread the disease, AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension.”

The release, not surprisingly caused a massive wave of public hysteria. The Religious Right came out of the woodwork. The executive vice-president of Moral Majority said, “We feel the deepest sympathy for AIDS victims, but I’m upset that the government is not spending more money to protect the general public from the gay plague.”

Fauci was much more careful after that, taking good council from Koop on public information techniques. At the same time, Koop learned everything he could about the virus, its’ behavior and transmission from Fauci, which he intended to share with the public in the future. Fauci also was the first to actively include the vocal AIDS activists in the government’s scientific advisory boards in their effort to combat the disease. At first the target of their anger and frustration, as more and more died in the face of a clearly disinterested government and hysterical public, Fauci subsequently earned the praise and admiration of leaders of the AIDS activist community.

Koop would consult with Fauci, day by day, as he formulated his drafts in secret. Fauci would later note, “He would come home from hearings downtown as things started to accelerate with HIV. As he was walking home, he had to pass my office. Around 7:30 at night, he would come knock at my door. He would say this thing about AIDS is very troubling, and I want to make the right impression on public awareness. He got it in his mind that we as the federal government need to be explicit about this — oral and anal sex, commercial sex. He was hell-bent on doing it. When it came out, it shocked a lot of people because of its explicitness.”

The report drew immediate criticism from the Conservative Right, but nothing compared to the furor that arose nineteen months later.

In the period following the initial report’s release, Koop quietly employed the Public Relations firm, Ogilvy and Mather, to make certain he had the messaging, language and imaging right. He then created an 8-page pamphlet for mail distribution under the title “Understanding AIDS,” after raising adequate funding on the side, from various branches of government, to support the mass mailing costs of delivering 107 million copies of the publication to every household in America.

His message was a call to action. His dramatic image was attached to the title: “A Message From The Surgeon General”. Understanding AIDS was not an innocent read. It was frank and factual, covering anal and vaginal intercourse, injectable drug transmission, and condoms for starters. It promoted sex education beginning in elementary school and pierced the current messaging of the most popular Christian televangelists of the day with this comment: “Who you are has nothing to do with whether you are in danger of being infected with the AIDS virus. What matters is what you do.”

The huge 1988 print run had required government printing press activities 24 hours a day for several weeks. Delivering the load for mailing utilized 38 boxcars. And approval for the mailing skirted normal procedure. When the eight page pamphlets began to arrive, the phones in the Senate offices of conservatives like Jess Helms rang off the hooks. Televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and their followers were apoplectic. Attempts to halt it were futile. The mass mailing had been completed in bulk. There was no going back.

His ghostly presence these days should disturb the sleep of RFK Jr. As Jacob Marley expressed to his ghost, “I wear the chain I forged in life.” At least for the moment, eternal torment appears this Kennedy’s reward.

Not so for C. Everett Koop. Whether personal religious or political motivation, his actions were guided by a fierce commitment to scientific integrity. When criticized Koop took no prisoners. His reply: “I’m the nation’s doctor, not the nation’s chaplain.”

“Talking Smart and Telling Lies.”

Posted on | December 1, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

On the back end of Thanksgiving celebrations with family, and in a reflective mood, I came across a United Methodist Insight publication from a year ago with the title “Remembering Big Lies Told at Church Pancake Suppers.” It was written by John Sumwalt, a retired United Methodist Pastor from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.

In the piece, Sumwalt recalls a Church supper in 1954 that resonated on many levels with my own upbringing at the time, and our views of right and wrong.

He writes: “What I remember most was the simple pleasure of sitting at the long white-linen-covered tables that were strung together in three rows across the width of the community building. I would listen to the neighbor men talk smart and tell lies. I didn’t know they were lies at the time and maybe those good men didn’t know either. But they were more than the common-place tall tales that old men tell with twinkling eyes. They were whopping speculations and exaggerations about threats to the nation. Now we would call them conspiracy theories. It was the time of the ‘big lie’ propagated by one of our Wisconsin senators, the now-infamous Joseph McCarthy.”

The date was June 9, 1954. This was over a year after Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The history shows that he had “rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies.” Clearly a psychopath, he escaped control of moderating voices, biting off ever larger targets, including now the U.S. Army.

“Judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one”, was how Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold described him. In 1954, McCarthy accused the army of “lax security at its top-secret army facilities” which he claimed were infiltrated by communists. The army responded by hiring veteran Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to defend itself.

As documentarians reported, “Mothers who never watched TV during the day were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.” McCarthy’s right-hand chief council that day was lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn. Pragmatic, ruthless, and evil to the core, Cohn’s career was launched by McCarthy, and his tainted touch destroyed lives and weakened the U.S. government for three more decades, straight up to the moment of his death from HIV/AIDS in 1986.

His style and tactics are widely felt today to be the strategic scaffolding of our Executive Branch’s attempted takeover of the US government. Not surprisingly, a direct assault on the control functions, values, and traditions of the US Military are a leading wedge in these attacks. They have literally exploded in the past week with revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself gave the go-ahead on a “kill them all” order that ultimately engulfed two survivors of a rocket attack on an alleged drug transporting speed boat.

In a 5-minute summation of the televised events of June 9, 1954, you (along with our leaders) are able to witness the historic takedown of McCarthy by Welch (with Cohn as witness) – the “slaying of the dragon” that finally destroyed McCarthy once and for all.

Cohn had reached an agreement with Welch that McCarthy would avoid attacking one particular Army service man as a communist if Welch remained civil. But Welch had laid a trap, and purposefully needled McCarthy into loosing his temper, and on camera, violating the agreement and “attacking the good lad,” who an outraged Welch tearfully defended in his historic and well-prepared retort.

As historian Thomas Doherty recalls, “It was as if the entire country had been waiting for somebody to finally say this line, ‘Have you no sense of decency.’” To which Jelani Cobb adds, “At the end of it, all the illusions, the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated about himself, had effectively been dispelled.”

As Welch pounced on his victim, Cohn winces as his dragon is slain. As Congress grapples with a situation that has veered dangerously out of control, we can only hope that this time “history will repeat.”

In the meantime, Cynthia B. Astle, Editor and Founder of United Methodist Insight, in the face of ICE raids and inappropriate use of the military and National Guard, recently wrote, “In light of recent events in which United Methodists have been actively resisting efforts by the Trump Administration to foment violence for the sake of enacting a police state, United Methodist Insight will post these guidelines from professor Timothy Snyder, author of the book, “On Tyranny.” We will leave this card posted at the top of Insight’s home page for the foreseeable future.

Pastor Sumwalt completes his piece by telling a story about how the “pancake loving” parishioners (and himself included) had not challenged the false fact that Martin Luther King was a Communist (because why else would the FBI bug him?) Regretting that he had remained silent and not challenged “the big lie,” he quotes MLK himself with this useful reminder for our perilous times:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

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Tags: Chrurch Pancake Suppers > congress > cynthis astle > Joe McCarthy > John Sumwalt > Joseph Welch > lies > menomomee falls > pete hegseth > Republicans > roy cohn > timothy snyder > trump > tyranny > United Methodist Insight > wisconsin

Emancipated Pragmatism – Democratic Symbolic Action

Posted on | November 24, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

Give thanks for our America, blemishes and all. Ken Burns says as much, making it clear, we are a mess of contradictions, and that is (in part) what makes us a uniquely American.

Consider that in a single week, we have had to endure Trump’s “Things happen” as he defended the Saudi crown prince ordering the Khashoggi killing, while also rejoice in his smack-down THE HILL headlined, “The Epstein files are a turning point in the Trump presidency, but it’s not over yet.” Perhaps Marjorie Taylor Greene said it best for all of us, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

In the shadow of an autocratic assault unparalleled in our modern history, Americans are searching for a silver lining. Is it helpful to our Democracy to be stress tested and our Constitutional weaknesses revealed so that we might take corrective actions in the future? Should we accept some blame for supporting a culture rich in celebrity idolatry, and one tolerant of unsustainable levels of inequity? Hasn’t unbridled capitalism diminished solidarity and good government in equal measure?

It is heartening to see many of our public servants, several of whom are first generation immigrants, display their competence, professionalism and courage in support of these United States. Our citizens want to believe that they, rather than their DOJ inquisitors, represent us.

It’s encouraging that compassion, understanding, and partnership remain embedded in the caring citizens who say NO to kings, challenged mass ICE invaders, and (with the Catholic Church) lent a powerful voice to immigrants across our land.

In times like these, I rely heavily on a book my son, Mike, published with the University of Alabama Press in 2004, titled, “Emancipating Pragmatism: emerson, jazz, and experimental writing”. The book derived from his PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, and extensively delved into the writings of both Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of “The Invisible Man”, and his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

So what did he say in his book that was so compelling that I turn to it today, on the eve of another Thanksgiving Celebration?

On page 3: Quoting Emerson, “To interpret Christ, it needs a Christ…to make good the cause of freedom against slavery you must be…Declaration of Independence walking.”

On page 7: On “fake news,” Mike writes, “Ultimately, Emerson came to believe that ‘America’ itself was a kind of text being read, its meaning a matter of collective decision. It followed that one’s linguistic theory, one’s view of how words generate meanings, had potentially large-scale social ramifications. In suggesting that words were ‘million-faced’, Emerson came to realize, he was suggesting that social possibility was remakeable.”

On page 18: On Change and Equity, “Emerson writes…’the philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility’”.

On page 19: On the American Culture and Diversity, “‘Out of the democratic principles set down on paper in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights’, Ellison says, Americans ‘were improvising themselves into a nation, scraping together a conscious culture out of various dialects, idioms, lingos, and methodologies of America’s diverse peoples and regions’”.

On page 24: On the Evolution of American Language and Culture, Mike quotes Ellison, “We forget, conveniently sometimes, that the language we speak is not English, although it is based on English. We forget that our language is such a flexible instrument because it has had so many dissonances thrown into it ….from Africa, from Mexico, from Spain, from God knows, everywhere.”

Page 25 and 28: On Creating Our History, Mike writes, “The jazz musician—who, Ellison says, always plays both ‘within and against the group’ — constantly reflects and redefines the ensemble in which he plays. Likewise the ensemble reflects and redefines the larger community to which it belongs….that (Ellison says) ‘anticipatory arena where actuality and possibility, past and present, are allowed to collaborate on a history of the future.’”

This has been a momentous week. We have made progress. We are not static, not trapped, not powerless or fixed in place. “Fluxions and Mobility” are certainly in play. But there is much left to be done. This should neither surprise nor discourage.

On the final page of Mike’s book, he writes, “An emancipated pragmatism happens whenever and wherever a creative mind or community of creative minds engages in democratic symbolic action.”

Democratic – Symbolic – Action. These are more than words. They are a culture of values. Our future is being written now. As Ken Burns recently claimed, the American Revolution was “the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.” By going public in support of our nation’s immigrants, and putting their bodies on the picket lines this week, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops stepped into the revolution with Christ with both feet and modeled for all of “Declaration of Independence Walking.”.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Tags: American Revolution > Emancipating Pragmatism: emerson > Invisible Man > jazz and experimental writing > Ken Burns > Mike Magee PhD > MTG > PBS > Ralph Ellison > ralph waldo emerson > thanksgiving > trump

“Those In Authority Must Retain the Public’s Trust.” The Catholic Bishops Have Spoken.

Posted on | November 16, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

“The key is trust. It is when people feel totally alienated and isolated that the society breaks down. Telling the truth is what held society together.”
___________________________________________________

The words above seem to be contemporary – written in the midst of ICE raids on helpless immigrants, drawing comparisons to Selma, Alabama years ago. And, in fact, they mirror comments by Evangelical Christian religion columnist, David French, this morning describing ICE actions against immigrants as “indiscriminate and brutal – We will look back on them with national shame.”

Surprisingly, the words above were voiced sixteen years ago in Washington, D.C. It was October 17, 2006. The HHS/CDC sponsored workshop that day was titled “Pandemic Influenza – Past, Present, Future: Communicating Today Based on the Lessons from the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.”

The speaker responsible for the quote above was writer/historian and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health historian, John M. Barry. His opening quote from George Bernard Shaw set a somewhat pessimistic (and as we would learn 14 years later, justified) tone for the day: “What we learn from history is that we do not learn anything from history.”

This was two years after the close of the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic with 8,469 cases and an 11% case fatality, and six years before MERS jumped from Egyptian camels to humans, infecting over 2,500 humans with a kill rate of 35% (858 known deaths.)

Specifically, John Barry was there that day in 2006 to share lessons learned from another epidemic, the 1918 Flu Epidemic. That epidemic affected an estimated 1/4 of the US population and resulted in 675,000 deaths among 103 million citizens (.065% mortality). The Covid-19 epidemic a century later affected 1/3 of our population, resulting in over 1.2 million deaths among our 340 million citizens (.035% mortality).

Barry’s primary message that day was that communication breeds trust, and without trust, society breaks down. His comments ring true two decades later. He said:

“The key is trust. It is when people feel totally alienated and isolated that the society breaks down. Telling the truth is what held society together.”

“The fear was so great that people were afraid to leave home or talk to one another. Everyone was holding their breath, almost afraid to breathe, for fear of getting sick.”

“False reassurance is the worst thing you can do. Don’t withhold information, because people will think you know more. Tell the truth— don’t manage the truth. If you don’t know something, say why you don’t know, and say what you need to do to know. Drown people with the truth, rather than withhold it.”

“The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that…those in authority must retain the public’s trust.”

Barry’s primary message was that communication breeds trust, and without trust, society breaks down. But clearly that day, there was also a bit of a self-congratulatory air, an arrogance that today rings naive. John Barry said, “Today, I think, as opposed to back in 1918, we don’t have as much of a problem with misinformation…I want to emphasize that it is not likely that public health officials would tell outright lies.”

With Covid came Trump and his sycophants and a barrage of “outright lies.” And that was just during his first term. Barry’s theory (that mistrust can destroy societal order) was and continues to be put to the test. And its not just with ICE on the streets and RFK Jr. now at the helm of HHS. It extends as far and as wide as human imperfection can undermine human goodness.

Pope Leo XIV said as much last week with these words, “This is a time of really reflecting on what’s happening, and to not be afraid to respond to the need to defend the dignity of people.” And the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, in their annual conference last week, wasted no time sending Trump and his supporters a clear message. They stated, in part, “We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity. For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.” This weekend, they took to the pulpits, and French says that Evangelical Christian pastors need to follow suit, or they will long regret it.

Barry’s words, now two decades old, are fresher and clearer today than the day they were first spoken on October 17, 2006. “The key is trust. It is when people feel totally alienated and isolated that the society breaks down. Telling the truth is what held society together.”

The President, and those in his orbit, are clearly unable to tell the truth.

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Tags: Catholic Bishops > Cobvid > Pope Leo XIV > RFK Jr. > trump > trust > truth

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:

The heart beat.
Breathing was essential for life.
A warm body was good. A dead body went cold.
Hearts had valves.
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.

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Tags: 4 humors > arteries > circulatory system > dark ages > Galen > greek and roman medicine > Harvey > heart > pumps > Rush > the enlightenment > truth in svience > veins

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.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Cathy Tie > Charles Darwin > Francis Galtin > Fyodor Urnov > genetics > genius factory > He Jiankul > medical ethics > Musk > Thiel

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.”