“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.”

 

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.

“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.

 

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.

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