Crash Course

We seem to be learning new things every day. What causes this virus, who is most at risk and, perhaps most importantly, how to treat it. New potential vaccines have emerged and are being more widely tested. This is all good news. It frustrates me how many people use predictions from three months ago as prove that we've overreacted or that experts don't know what they're talking about. This is an entirely new thing and most experts would openly admit that they didn't know what they're talking about, only using what they did know to make the most educated guesses possible. It rankles me that people like Elon Musk can take potshots at experts, their voices amplified only by their vast amounts of money. Elon Musk is entitled to his opinion, of course, but it is not the equal on this matter of that of a scientist. Even on Gilligan's Island, they listened to the professor and not the millionaire. 

Still, it's inspiring to see how much we learn so quickly, though it should be no surprise. The Internet has long been a whipping boy for those who decry our siloed, confirmation bias culture (much of it deserved) but there's no denying we live in an unprecedented time of information riches. The English version of Wikipedia features 50 times more words than the Encyclopædia Britannica. If Wikipedia, not always the most scholarly place for data, isn't rigorous enough for you, you should know that there is more information in a single edition of the New York Times than the average person in 17th-century England would have come across in a lifetime. We are blessed.

That's not to say that discovery isn't sometimes painful. News of new COVID-19 treatments is heartening but we should hope that the labs that are furiously testing right now don't include a mind as unlucky as Thomas Midgley's. There is no denying the brilliance of Midgley, who owned 171 patents and taught himself chemistry but there's also no avoiding the fact that he is one of the most dangerous, destructive Americans who ever lived, responsible for two disastrous discoveries in a ten-year period.

From the early days of automobiles, engines "knocked," making increasingly loud noises as they accelerated. Engineers and car manufacturers went out to find a way to stop that issue. Midgley came up with mixing iodine with gasoline, which reduced knocking slightly but not enough. Then he mixed gasoline with lead, which reduced knocking a great deal and could be patented (which ethanol, providing much the same benefit, could not). Everybody knew that lead was dangerous but General Motors, who employed Midgley, didn't see that as any reason not to profit from pumping it into the air and soon leaded gasoline had 80% of the market. Lead poisoning causes high-blood pressure, fetal abnormalities and brain damage. Worst of all, it particularly affects children. It's estimated that from 1920 to 1970, the heyday for leaded gasoline, 70 million children suffered from lead poisoning. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky writes "If the suffering of children goes to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.” Oh, car drivers paid that price and then some. The brain damage caused by lead makes people violent and indeed, crime rates spiked in areas about two decades after leaded gasoline proliferated (and fell in a similar fashion once they were banned). As an encore, Midgley later developed Freon, the brand name for a substance in refrigerators known as chlorofluorocarbons. Yes, after poisoning the equivalent of Thailand's entire population's worth of children, Midgley then produced the stuff that put a hole in the ozone layer. In his last days, Midgley was bedridden with polio and devised a harness system of pulleys and ropes that helped him move around his house. One day he got tangled in the ropes and strangled himself, proving that he was not only the president of the Designers of Products That Kill Club, but also a member.

Before we pile on poor Thomas Midgley, whose effects are still with us (we supposedly won't be back to pre-Midgley levels of lead in the atmosphere until 2050), his achievements, while catastrophic, paved the way for safer alternatives. Car culture, highways, interstate travel, even movie theaters (some of the first to adopt the air conditioning capabilities that Midgley's Freon made possible) are all children of Midgley's toxic parents of leaded gas and CFCs. It's just more proof that discovery is a messy business.

Scientists make mistakes all the time, they just usually don't have millions of lives at stake. Voltaire, for example, believed that fossils of seashells could be found on mountaintops because ancient picnickers left them there. Descartes suspected that monkeys had the power of speech but didn't use it around humans in fear of being asked to work. Galileo was one of the early voices of heliocentrism, the theory that the earth rotates around the sun. Quite right, of course, except that Galileo's proof was the tides, which have nothing to do with a moving earth. How else, Galileo argued, would the sea move in and out every day if not for the fact that the earth is spinning. Doesn't water in a bucket move when you carry the bucket? The problem is that there are two tides per day, which refuted that theory. Galileo, perceptible to confirmation bias as anyone, refused to believe. 

And what of Aristotle, who said that the natural state of things was rest and that objects would return to that state if left alone? It was Galileo who disproved this one, noticing that motion is relative to other objects. You can't say something is at rest absolutely, only that it is resting relative to other moving objects. Galileo wrote this in 1632, nearly 300 years before Einstein repackaged it as the theory of relativity (and, crucially, added some bits about objects moving at close to the speed of light in a vacuum). Galileo's thoughts had him condemned and imprisoned by the Catholic Church, Einstein's breakthrough didn't cause quite the same stir. The first reports of his theory of general relativity were covered by the New York Times' golfing correspondent. In the same vein, the news of the Wright Brothers' first manned powered flight appeared first in the magazine Gleanings in Bee Culture. 

And why not? We could learn a great deal about our world by gleaning bee culture. Discoverers of all kinds have been fascinated by our stingy friends. Edmund Hillary, the first man to see the world from the top of Mount Everest, listed his occupation until his death as an "apiarist." Bees have wonderful senses of direction, they always know where the sun is, even if it is on the other side of the globe. They've developing this skill to communicate with other bees where the best nectar is, using the sun as a reference point, even on cloudy days and at night. Most bees buzz in the key of A, offering tantalizing hope of an all-bee performance of the 7th Symphony by Beethoven, but when they get tired they shift to E, threatening the doldrums of a spiritless all-bee performance of the 7th Symphony by Bruckner.

Even bees know the dangers of discovery. When Zeus and Hera, the king and queen of the Greek gods, were to be married they put out a call for gifts from all the fauna of the world, the best of which would receive a divine wish. Animals of all kinds brought items for the gods to peruse but when the nuptuated couple came to Melissa, a small honey bee, and her jar of a golden substance, they found the winner—honey so good they could hardly stand it. As the winner, Melissa was asked to offer her wish. She told the god of thunder that her work was toilsome and that other animals frequently threatened her labor, couldn't she have a weapon to defend herself with? Enraged as such a destructive request, Zeus told Melissa she would have her weapon, a barbed stinger, but should she use it, it would take her life as well. Today, the Greek word for honeybee remains "melissa" and the scientific classification of bees, hypnoptera, means "wedding wings." Melissa learned the lesson that Thomas Midgley discovered centuries later, that your own creation may be your undoing.