8/14/2019 You May Shut Down The Government, But Dont Shut Down
Science!
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The Yahoo coveragesays two Americans and one German American won
the prize.
My bet for the most accurate reporting is the New York Times
articlethat says three Americans won the
prize.
This is mainly because I remember I wanted to leave France and
return stateside with a French citizenship
as a souvenir. I found out from American authorities that if I
wanted to take any kind of oath of allegiance
to any country that was not the U.S. of A., then the U.S. of A.
would consider it a renouncement of
citizenship.
I doubt they would change the rules on anything that big. I
thought I was part of the tradition of great
people of European descenteducation in my case, but birth in
most coming to America because it has
the most powerful tradition of scientific research and
advancement of any country in the world.
I thought of in particular Wilhelm Reich, the great analytic
thinker, who had been born in the Ukraine like
my ancestors (although it was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire)
and how he migrated to America.
The New York Times reporting caught the irony that appealed to
me when I first saw (on Yahoo) that this
prestigious prize had been given to three Americans.
As far as I can figure, their work is really important and
meritorious of the prize. Any and I mean any
information about the intravesicular transport system can lead
to some serious drug development.
Not the kind where drug companies are trying to rip off little
pieces of various alkaloid constituents of the
marijuana plant and patent them to make money. I mean drugs that
are original and of real utility in
illnesses that kill folks.
The work done by the three winners cost the American National
Institutes of Health about 49 million
dollars. It is what is generally called basic research, the kind
that is undertaken to find out more about
how things work, without a clear endpoint that would be solving
a disease.
The National Institutes of Health are currently on shutdown.
The shutdown has effectively stopped science. Basic research has
traditionally been the most difficult
to fund, but it has also been most precious in teaching mankind
things it might not know about otherwise.
I had to fight back tears when I got to this paragraph in the
new York Times article: One of the new
laureates, Dr. Rothman, touched on this point in a news
conference, saying that he began his scientific
career when your idea was the only limit, any risk could be
taken no matter how difficult. He
experienced five years of failure before the first signs of
success, he said. Today, he said, there is less
support for risk ideas, and it is becoming a pressing national
issue, if not an international one.
There was a brief time in my career when I fought to do
research, in a highly political system that had no
use for junior females, that told me to hitch my wagon to the
star of someone older and more
experienced.
I remember deciding that science would advance without me, and
that the hubris of being the one who
did the research and published the papers was, at least for me
personally, a poor second to taking clinical
care of humans. This became my personal priority, and has
remained my personal priority.
Now, for the first time, I do not see science advancing further.
I have never seen government, in
my lifetime, do anything as stupid and meaningless as this
shutdown. Someone has decided all
government workers will get their lost pay. Time is precious,
and it takes time to advance science.
In my current field of marijuana medicine, there is absolutely
no doubt that the most important advances
are being made in other countries. Israel, Asia, Spain and the
European Union.
In petty politics, we are starting to lose the scientific
supremacy that brought to the U.S.A. the most
http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/biography.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/health/3-win-joint-nobel-prize-in-medicine.html?_r=0http://news.yahoo.com/2-americans-german-american-win-nobel-medicine-181532959.html
