Louis Pasteur

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pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

It was the original site, and is still a working part of one of the world’s preeminent research laboratories: the Institut Pasteur, whose eponymous founder opened its doors in 1888. As much as anyone on earth, he could—and did—claim the honor of discovering the germ theory of disease and founding the new science of microbiology. Louis Pasteur was born to a family of tanners working in the winemaking town of Arbois, surrounded by the sights and smells of two ancient crafts whose processes depended on the chemical interactions between microorganisms and macroorganisms—between microbes, plants, and animals. Tanners and vintners perform their magic with hides and grapes through the processes of putrefaction and fermentation, whose complicity in virtually every aspect of food production, from pickling vegetables to aging cheese, would fascinate Pasteur long before he turned his attention to medicine.

The dispute embraced not just fermentation, in which sugars are transformed into simpler compounds like carboxylic acids or alcohol, but the related process of putrefaction, the rotting and swelling of a dead body as a result of the dismantling of proteins. Credit: National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine Louis Pasteur, 1822–1895 The processes, although distinct, had always seemed to have something significant in common. Both are, not to put too fine a point on it, aromatic; the smell of rotten milk or cheese is due to the presence of butyric acid (which also gives vomit its distinctive smell), while the smells of rotting flesh come from the chemical process that turns amino acids into the simple organic compounds known as amines, in this case, the aptly named cadaverine and putrescine, which were finally isolated in 1885.

Though its age and extent was unknown to Cohn, he did know that the microorganism that Koch had found was part of this bacterial universe. He published Koch’s work in his journal, Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen—in English, Contributions on Plant Biology—in 1876. The discovery immediately turned Koch into one of Europe’s best-known life scientists. Which brought him to the attention of an even more famous one: Louis Pasteur. In 1877, Pasteur took it upon himself to resolve what remained of the debate about the causes of anthrax. The bacteria isolated by Koch were still thought to be, in the words of at least one biologist, “neither the cause nor necessary effect of splenic fever [i.e., anthrax]” since exposure to oxygen destroyed them, but material containing the dead organisms still caused anthrax.


pages: 300 words: 84,762

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases by Paul A. Offit

1960s counterculture, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan

Jeryl Lynn Eight Doors The Destroying Angel Coughs, Colds, Cancers, and Chickens The Monster Maker Political Science Blood Animalcules An Uncertain Future Unrecognized Genius Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Searchable Terms About the Author Copyright About the Publisher PROLOGUE Scientists aren't famous. They never endorse products or sign autographs or fight through crowds of screaming admirers. But at least you know a few of their names, like Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; or Albert Schweitzer, the missionary who built hospitals in Africa; or Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization; or Marie Curie, the discoverer of radiation; or Albert Einstein, the physicist who defined the relationship between mass and energy. But I'd bet not one of you knows the name of the scientist who saved more lives than all other scientists combined-a man who survived Depression-era poverty; the harsh, unforgiving plains of southeastern Montana; abandonment by his father; the early death of his mother; and, at the end of his life, the sad realization that few people knew who he was or what he had done: Maurice Hilleman, the father of modern vaccines.

In the late 1700s Edward Jenner, a physician working in southern England, made the world's first vaccine. Jenner found that he could protect people from smallpox-a disease that has claimed five hundred million victims-by injecting them with cowpox, a related virus. One hundred years passed. In the late 1800s Louis Pasteur, a chemist working in Paris, made the world's second vaccine. Pasteur's vaccine, made by drying spinal cords from infected rabbits, prevented the single most deadly infection of man-rabies. Only one person has ever survived rabies without receiving a rabies vaccine. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientists made six more vaccines.

And in 1883 in Bremen, Germany, arm-to-arm transfer caused a massive outbreak of hepatitis. Although Edward Jenner made the first viral vaccine, he didn’t know that smallpox and cowpox were related viruses. That was because he’d never heard of viruses. Edward Jenner made his observations several decades before scientists showed what viruses were and how they reproduced. FROM LOUIS PASTEUR, A FRENCH CHEMIST, HILLEMAN LEARNED THAT vaccines could be made from dangerous human viruses. (Jenner had used a cow virus.) Pasteur developed humankind’s second vaccine, one that prevented a uniformly fatal disease: rabies. On July 4, 1885, a rabid dog attacked a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister in the town of Meissengott, a small village in the province of Alsace, France.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

An even greater challenge was enabling urbanites to consume food items that were not generally cooked—like wine and milk products. The sophisticated urban societies of East Asia appear to have invented a version of the process now named for Louis Pasteur centuries before the birth of the famous French scientist. The Western adoption of pasteurization had its roots in the scientific debate over the spontaneous generation of living organisms, such as bacteria. In one of the great battles of nineteenth-century science, the French chemist Louis Pasteur faced off against the far older and in many ways more distinguished naturalist Félix Pouchet before the French Academy of Sciences. Pasteur showed that when sterilized liquids were placed in sealed swan-necked glass containers, there was no subsequent growth of microorganisms.

., “Explaining the Slowdown in Medical Spending Growth among the Elderly, 1999–2012.” A good health system: Daschle et al., Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis. fewer than four hundred geriatricians: Petriceks et al., “Trends in Geriatrics Graduate Medical Education Programs and Positions, 2001 to 2018.” Reed and Louis Pasteur: “Louis Pasteur,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. exclusively on medical insurance: Lubrano, “The World Has Suffered through Other Deadly Pandemics. But the Response to Coronavirus Is Unprecedented.” mostly contained to Asia: World Health Organization Global Influenza Program Surveillance Network, “Evolution of H5N1 Avian Influenza Viruses in Asia.”

Vox, March 27, 2020. www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/27/21194402/coronavirus-masks-n95-respirators-personal-protective-equipment-ppe. ———. “Why America’s Coronavirus Testing Barely Improved in April.” Vox, May 1, 2020. www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21242589/coronavirus-testing-swab-reagent-supply-shortage. “Louis Pasteur.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Accessed December 23, 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Pasteur. Lovelace, Berkeley, Jr. “Warren Buffett: Bezos, Dimon and I Aim for Something Bigger on Health Care Than Just Shaving Costs.” CNBC, February 26, 2018. www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/buffett-my-health-care-venture-with-bezos-and-dimon-is-going-for-something-bigger-than-shaving-a-few-percent-off-costs.html.


Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

On his return, his colleagues had purposely kept him in the dark as to their progress, wanting him to see it for himself, firsthand. He knew that a thing like this—the creature he was seeing, something that shouldn’t have existed, that hadn’t existed for more than three thousand years—wasn’t simply possible. It was inevitable. CHAPTER THREE Today 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, BOSTON. Ten minutes past two in the morning, and the warrenlike lab tucked into the second floor of the glass and steel New Research Building at Harvard Medical School was as alive as the middle of the day. Teams of young postdocs, grad students, and harried fourth-year med students huddled over high-tech workstations, engaged in what appeared to be a highly choreographed dance involving pipettes, Petri dishes, and DNA-sequencing arrays.

You can extract that genome—it’s kind of like a linear tape—and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell. —GEORGE M. CHURCH CHAPTER NINE Early Fall 2008 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, BOSTON. Sometimes, it’s the strange questions that keep you up at night. Church leaned back in his chair, his long legs tucked beneath the desk in the middle of his stark, brightly lit office, nestled deep in a corner of his second-floor laboratory. His right hand was still resting on the phone in front of him, long after he’d hung up, his feet bouncing against the carpet beneath the desk in the self-taught routine he used to keep himself awake.

PART THREE I like to keep the median age in my lab low so we can dream together and make those dreams come true. They don’t yet think things are impossible. —GEORGE M. CHURCH It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow. —GEORGE M. CHURCH CHAPTER FIFTEEN Winter 2012 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, NEW RESEARCH BUILDING, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. Luhan Yang was moving fast as she navigated the crowded hallway that bisected the third floor of the New Research Building. Although everyone walked quickly at Harvard Medical School, Luhan was a bullet cutting through the stream of med students, lab technicians, and professors, determined not to be late to the open afternoon seminar on knockout genes and antimalarial mosquitoes.


pages: 450 words: 114,766

Milk! by Mark Kurlansky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, clean water, Donner party, double helix, feminist movement, haute cuisine, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Poor babies were fed from animal horns. It seems likely that milk was not originally produced for feeding babies or for drinking. Instead, as an extremely unstable product, it was probably cured, hardened, soured, or fermented into a variety of highly nutritious and stable foods. Many centuries before Louis Pasteur, the ancient Assyrians knew, probably from their own experience, that the only way to keep fresh milk from becoming poisonous was to boil it. The resulting scum on the pot mixed with breadcrumbs was a children’s treat, which they lapped directly from the pot. It was believed back then, and many twenty-first-century people would agree, that boiled milk lacks flavor and that only the scum and the skin left on top are good to eat.

Those who abstained from milk, cheese, and all dairy products in the late summer were not stricken, and even those that were, but then abstained from dairy, had only a mild attack. Some suspected that the disease was caused by a poisonous dew that formed at night. Others suspected that it was caused by an invisible microorganism—one of the early versions of Louis Pasteur’s later “germ theory.” That was an astute guess, but it actually had nothing to do with the cause of this disease. Cows grazed on the poisonous white snakeroot plant during late summer and early fall droughts, when the normal grasses were not available and the herds foraged for alternatives. Cows that grazed in enclosed pastures with few weeds did not become infected.

Borden, on the other hand, offered New Yorkers milk in a can for their babies that was both safe and sweet. 12 A NEW AND ENDLESS FIGHT Those for whom it has seemed odd that the French, who have had so little interest in drinking milk, could have such an impact on milk production can take comfort in the fact that Louis Pasteur was not particularly interested in milk. His concern and his research were primarily focused on beer and wine. But his idea, his “germ theory”—so called because it took time before it was accepted as fact—had a huge impact on dairies and on public health and medicine in general. Easy to state but complicated to demonstrate, Pasteur’s theory was that there are tiny organisms, invisible to the naked eye, that cause disease—and other effects, such as fermentation.


pages: 509 words: 142,456

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow

augmented reality, Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, New Journalism, Stephen Hawking, trade route, unbiased observer, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Lumet. Louis Pasteur. Translated by Frederic Cooper. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914. Kelley, E. C., ed. “Joseph Lister.” Medical Classics 2 (1937): 4–101. Latour, B. The Pasteurization of France. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988. Lawrence, C., and R. Dixey. “Practising on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theories of Disease.” In Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, edited by C. Lawrence, 153–215. London: Routledge, 1992. Nuland, S. B. Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, 343–385. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Porter, J. R. “Louis Pasteur: Achievements and Disappointments.”

Clearly, surgery needed both anesthesia and antisepsis, but in terms of overall importance, knowledge of bacteria and how to control their behavior had a greater singular impact. * * * Surgical infections were tragic and scientific explanations were needed. The answers came primarily through the research of two geniuses. They were men who saw things that other individuals did not: Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, and Joseph Lister, an English surgeon. Pasteur’s discoveries changed Medicine in many ways, but it was their relevance to wound infections that had the greatest impact on the development of surgery. He was born in the Jura, an area of lakes and mountains in eastern France. In his early twenties, Pasteur moved to Paris, where, in 1847, he graduated from the renowned École Normale Supérieure, having submitted two theses, one in chemistry and the other in physics.

It was at the University of Lille that Pasteur voiced one of the most famous quotes in the annals of education and science: “dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les espirits préparés (in the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind) (Oeuvres de Pasteur, 7 vols., ed. Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot [Paris: Masson et Cie, 1939], 7:131). 12. SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

I ask why so many people believe we are getting stuck at the frontier, and consider what it might mean to say that when so much around us seems to be changing, when ideas appear so plentiful. Let's begin by looking at an area that concerns us all: medicine. 2 The Breakthrough Problem Matters of Life and Death Summer, 1879 Louis Pasteur, aged fifty-seven, already the most feted scientist of his age, was on the cusp of a new breakthrough. Pasteur had been studying chicken cholera. While preparing the bacillus, he accidentally left the cultures in his laboratory for the summer. Returning in the autumn, Pasteur stumbled across his old experiment.

The world's great laboratories also count: the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, with its twelve Nobel Prizes, CERN or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. So too would a range of institutes supporting diversity of innovative thinking – anything from Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study to the MIT Media Lab, the Santa Fe Institute and Japan's RIKEN and the eponymous institutes of Max Planck, Louis Pasteur and Francis Crick. But the diversity is greater still – you could argue that the structure of Oxbridge colleges enables experimental spaces, just as organisations like Y Combinator do for startup ideas, or ARPA does for technology in general. Lastly come even purer breakthrough organisations – those with a specific mission geared around executing a particular idea.

Go bolder It's notable how many scientists with major discoveries to their name are also musicians, writers, philosophers, activists and communicators. Physicists like Einstein, Richard Feynman and Werner Heisenberg were accomplished musicians; Marie Curie, Fritz Haber and Erwin Schrödinger wrote poetry; biological and medical researchers from Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister to Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Dorothy Hodgkin were artists. Is there a connection? Looking at hundreds of discoveries and significant scientists from the UK, France, Germany and the US over the twentieth century gave J. Rogers Hollingsworth a clear answer: those with what is known as ‘high cognitive complexity’ were much more likely to make major discoveries.48 Scientists capable of internalising many different contexts, backgrounds and fields and hold them in their heads at once, comfortable with the ambiguity and contradiction, who were prepared to look from multiple viewpoints, who drank in complexity and range, had the biggest success.


The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilisation by Nicholas P. Money

agricultural Revolution, bioinformatics, CRISPR, double helix, flex fuel, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, microbiome

Rees in 1870. 3 In t roduc t ion: y e ast y basics The combination of better microscopes and clever experiments on fermentation encouraged the conclusion that the yeast plant, as it became known, was the live agent that produced alcohol in wine and beer.4 Organic chemists continued to dispute these findings, choosing to believe that the objects described as cells were minerals precipitated from chemical reactions. They thought that alcohol was a product of pure chemistry rather than biochemistry. But with evidence mounting in the 1860s in favor of yeast as the catalyst, Louis Pasteur silenced most of the dissenting voices with a series of brilliant experimental demonstrations.5 Yeast was proven to be a living entity and recognized as a microorganism of spectacular consequence in human affairs. There is some Western bias in this assessment of yeast’s supremacy. Though the fungus is foundational to human civilization, our nutritional reliance on yeast is concentrated among the descendants of the Roman Empire living in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Australasia, and the Americas.

Bubbles of gas brought the cells to the surface of the mash, where the foam was collected by skimming, washed with distilled water, allowed to settle, and compressed into cakes. The collaboration between Reininghaus and Mautner marked the conjunction between the industrialization of Europe and the new science of microbiology championed by Louis Pasteur. With our contemporary familiarity with microbes it is easy to devalue Pasteur’s experiments showing that bacteria and fungi soured milk and brewed beer, but they helped to sweep away 2,000 years of ignorance.10 The impact of this intellectual revolution on the practical business of brewing and baking was profound.

Buehler, Bread Science: The Chemistry and Craft of Making Bread (Hillsborough, NC: Two Blue Books, 2006). 9. D. F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); M. Roehr, in History of Modern Biotechnology I, edited by A. Fiechter (Amsterdam: Springer, 2000), 127–8. 10. P. Debré, Louis Pasteur, translated by E. Forster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 11. E. N. Horsford, Report on Vienna Bread (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875). 12. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, translated by G. E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003) 526. 190 not es 13.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

There was no tribunal, no method, to sort the good photographic plates from the bad. The matter was settled the old-fashioned way, by a mix of partisan argument, political maneuvers, and propaganda. SCIENTIFIC TRIBUNALS MAY be uncommon, but they have been assembled on an ad hoc basis from time to time, and one in particular offers some signal lessons about science. Louis Pasteur is perhaps the most renowned of all French scientists—and surely the most revered by the French themselves. In his lifetime, from 1822 to 1895, he pioneered vaccination against anthrax and rabies, helped to discover the nature of fermentation, developed a sterilization technique (“pasteurization”) to prevent milk and wine from spoiling, laid the foundations for the germ theory of disease, and uncovered the first evidence for the remarkable fact that the chemistry of life is overwhelmingly composed of “right-handed” molecules.

On the other hand, to form an opinion about a theoretical auxiliary assumption, such as Kelvin’s assumption that the earth is entirely solid, requires further evidence, and the significance of this evidence for the auxiliary assumption will itself depend on further auxiliary assumptions. Among these assumptions may appear the original hypothesis, forming an unbreakable circle. When Louis Pasteur, for example, ventured to show in the 1860s that life could not form spontaneously from an inorganic mix of “hay soup” and air, he needed a supply of air that was sterile, that is, free of the “spores” that he hypothesized to be the source of all mold, slime, and other growth in the soup. As you may remember, he and other experimenters tried various procedures to obtain spore-free air: heating the air, storing it in a greasy container, sampling it from alpine peaks.

In each case, accusations of impropriety have spurred illuminating debates about the culpability of the scientists and the damage done to science—with some writers arguing for little culpability and less damage—but there is scant doubt that a certain amount of deliberate misrepresentation took place. 48 Eddington’s original presentation: Dyson, Eddington, and Davidson, “Determination of the Deflection of Light.” 52 Pasteur and Pouchet had sparred: This story is told in Collins and Pinch, The Golem, which also contains a brief, accessible, and rather unsympathetic account of Eddington’s maneuvers. 52 a combative and unfair disputant: A balanced biography that takes the notebooks into account is Patrice Debré’s Louis Pasteur. 53 the industry-supported group is considerably more likely: On soda: Bes-Rastrollo et al., “Financial Conflicts of Interest and Reporting Bias Regarding the Association between Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Weight Gain.” On second hand smoke: Barnes and Bero, “Why Review Articles on the Health Effects of Passive Smoking Reach Different Conclusions.”


pages: 476 words: 148,895

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

Yeast could now be treated simply as another ingredient rather than as a locally variable community of organisms in need of special care and feeding. In fact, as microbes go, S. cerevisiae is notable for not playing well with others, especially bacteria. Compared with wild yeasts, commercial yeast cannot survive very long in the acidic environment created by lactobacilli. While scientists have known about yeast since Louis Pasteur first identified it in 1857, the intricate microbial world within a wild sourdough culture like mine was a complete mystery until fairly recently—and remains at least a partial mystery even today. In 1970, a team of USDA scientists based in Albany, California, collected samples of sourdough starter from five San Francisco bakeries and conducted a kind of microbial census.

All cooking is transformation and, rightly viewed, miraculous, but fermentation has always struck people as particularly mysterious. For one thing, the transformations are so dramatic: fruit juice into wine?!—a liquid with the power to change minds? For another, it has only been 155 years since Louis Pasteur figured out what was actually going on in a barrel of crushed grapes when it starts to seethe. To ferment is to “boil,” people would say confidently (“to boil” is what the word “ferment” means), but they could not begin to say how the process started or why this particular boil wasn’t hot to the touch.

Now, any true fermento would say that, by dwelling on the links between fermentation and death, I’m being way too hard on these microbes, most of which they count as benign friends and partners. I’m trapped in a hygienic, Pasteurian perspective, they would say, in which the microbial world is regarded foremost as a mortal threat. Actually, Louis Pasteur himself held a more nuanced view of the microbes he discovered, but his legacy is a century-long war on bacteria, a war in which most of us have volunteered or been enlisted. We deploy our antibiotics and hand sanitizers and deodorants and boiling water and “pasteurization” and federal regulations to hold off the molds and bacteria and so, we hope, hold off disease and death.


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the way that advances in the scientific knowledge of viruses and other infectious pathogens can blind medical researchers to these ecological and immunological insights and the epidemic lurking just around the corner. Ever since the German bacteriologist Robert Koch and his French counterpart, Louis Pasteur, inaugurated the “germ theory” of disease in the 1880s by showing that tuberculosis was a bacterial infection and manufacturing vaccines against anthrax, cholera, and rabies, scientists—and the public health officials who depend on their technologies—have dreamed of defeating the microbes of infectious disease.

When Pfeiffer first advanced his claim for the etiological role of his bacillus, the science of bacteriology and the germ-theory paradigm (one germ, one disease) was in the ascendancy. With the invention of improved achromatic lenses and better culture-staining techniques, by the late 1880s Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur had brought a series of hitherto hard-to-detect germs into view. These included not only such landmark bacteria as the bacilli of fowl cholera and tuberculosis, but streptococcus and staphylococcus. In short order, their discoveries paved the way for the development of serums and bacterial vaccines against diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and plague, and by the eve of World War I, Avery and Cole were using the same methods to develop vaccines for pneumococcal pneumonias.

Britain’s Royal College of Physicians concurred, arguing that there was “insufficient evidence” for Pfeiffer’s claim, though it was happy to allow that the bacillus played an important secondary role in fatal respiratory complications of influenza. In other words, the etiological role of B. influenzae might be open to question, but the bacterial paradigm was not. However, this paradigm was now facing a serious challenge from another quarter. If Koch was the German father of bacteriology, then Louis Pasteur was its French parent or, as one writer puts it, microbiology’s “lynchpin.” In his first biological paper, published in 1857 at the age of 35, Pasteur, then a relatively unknown French chemist working in Lille, boldly formulated what he called the germ theory of fermentation—namely, that each particular type of fermentation is caused by a specific kind of microbe.


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Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Crawford, Dorothy H.

clean water, coronavirus, CRISPR, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, Francisco Pizarro, hygiene hypothesis, Louis Pasteur, megacity, Nelson Mandela, stem cell

Of course, this realization did not dawn overnight, but as more and more bacteria were identified, the ‘germ theory’ took hold, and by the beginning of the 20th century it was widely accepted even in non-scientific circles that microbes could cause disease. Key to this momentous leap in understanding were technical developments in microscopes made by the Dutch lens-maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) in the 16th century. He was the first to visualize microbes, but it was not until the mid-1800s that Louis Pasteur (1822–95) working in Paris and Robert Koch (1843–1910) in Berlin carried out the ground-breaking scientific work which established ‘germs’ as the cause of infectious diseases, earning them the title ‘the founding fathers of microbiology’. Pasteur was instrumental in dispelling the general belief in ‘spontaneous generation’, that is, the generation of life from inorganic material.

These symptoms are caused by T cells infiltrating the nerves and producing tumours in vital organs. Once the virus was isolated in 1967, it was soon discovered that a very similar virus, herpesvirus of turkeys, could protect chickens from Marek’s disease virus without ill effect. Rabies vaccination Several years after Jenner’s experiments, Louis Pasteur, working in Paris, made a vaccine against rabies virus from dried spinal cords of rabies-infected animals. This virus is present in saliva from rabid animals and generally circulates among wild animals such as dogs, foxes, and bats. Although some species can survive an attack of rabies, untreated human infections, usually acquired through the bite of a rabid dog, are 100%; fatal.


pages: 143 words: 43,096

Tel Aviv 2015: The Retro Travel Guide by Claudia Stein

illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, machine readable, New Urbanism, Suez canal 1869, urban planning

Nowadays, it is only frequented for special events. 21) The Floating Orange (Mazal Aryé St.) At the eastern end of Mazal Aryé Street, after passing the Richter Art Gallery (No. 24), you will see this exceptional installation: an orange tree floating above the earth. With this work, the artist Ran Morin presents the fusion of nature and technology. 22) St. Georgius (1-5, Louis Pasteur St.) This Greek Orthodox church from the 19th century is located right on the border with Ajami where Christians from the Near East settled down at the end of the 19th century. 5.3.4 Ajami At the end of the 19th century, Jaffa was booming. The economy was strong and there were plans being made for a railway to Jerusalem.

The participants are actors, musicians, dancers, acrobats in one. Lots of rhythm and visual effects flow from the stage into the audience. Founded by three Israelis, Mayumana has become so successful that they decided to have two groups: one performs in Tel Aviv and another one is always on tour. Mayúmana House, Louis Pasteur St. 15, Tel. 03-681.1787, http://www.mayumana.com, http://www.youtube.com/user/mayumanamomentum, info@mayumana.com 7.) The Clipa Theater, founded in 1995, is considered Israel’s best “visual theater”. Idit Herman and Dmitry Tyulpanov have founded a company that combines contemporary dance and musical effects in a new way and with self-designed costumes.


The Atlas of Disease by Sandra Hempel

clean water, coronavirus, Easter island, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, trade route, wikimedia commons

Not all parts of the New World provided a suitable environment or climate for the carrier mosquitoes, but by the nineteenth century the infection was widespread in the Mississippi Valley, the central valley of California and the coastal lowlands of northern South America. Breakthroughs in scientific research When the French chemist Louis Pasteur published his germ theory in the 1860s, scientists began to consider that an organism might be responsible for the disease. The first breakthrough came in 1880, when a French army surgeon, Alphonse Laveran, identified the parasite group that caused the infection in human beings. However, his findings were heavily contested as researchers were expecting bacteria to be responsible.

More recent epidemics have broken out in India in the first half of the twentieth century, and in Vietnam during the war in the 1960s and 1970s. Plague is now commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, which areas now account for more than 95 per cent of reported cases. The Modern Plague though coincided with huge scientific advances in our understanding of infectious disease. Building on Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were identifying the various bacteria responsible for different diseases. In 1894, as the Modern Plague arrived in Hong Kong, the French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin identified the organism that causes plague and explained its mode of transmission.


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Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Also see: Rebecca Davis, “The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing and Briefly Saved Lives,” NPR Morning Edition, January 12, 2015, transcript and audio, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920 the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives?t=1577014322310. On Louis Pasteur: Louise E. Robbins, Louis Pasteur and the Hidden World of Microbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On Joseph Lister: Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Brain hemispheres and the Coke experiment: Michael S.

He died two weeks later, at age forty-seven, from an infected wound that he got during the scuffle. His successor at the hospital’s maternity clinic discontinued the peculiar handwashing protocol. Deaths again soared. The same year that Semmelweis was locked in the asylum, a French biologist named Louis Pasteur was called in to investigate the cause of a mysterious illness that afflicted silkworms and threatened France’s silk industry. It would lead to the discovery of germs, and the new frame of “germ theory.” Around the same time, a gentleman scientist in England named Joseph Lister—baron, doctor, member of the Royal Society, mutton-chop sideburns—had been experimenting with sterilizing the bandages for wounds to reduce infections.


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Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine by John Abramson

disinformation, germ theory of disease, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, p-value, placebo effect, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Accessed August 4, 2002. 191 release enzymes that destroy the fibers: Ibid. 191 American College of Rheumatology’s: American College of Rheumatology Subcommittee on Osteoarthritis Guidelines, “Recommendations for the Medical Management of Osteoarthritis of the Hip and Knee,” Arthritis and Rheumatism 43:1905–1915, 2000. 194 Louis Pasteur accepted a position: René Dubos, Pasteur and Modern Science. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960, p. 40. 194 bacteria, which appeared rod-shaped: Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), Zephyrus. Viewed at http://www.zephyrus.co.uk/louispasteur.html. Accessed December 16, 2003. 194 devastating the silkworm industry: Dubos, op. cit., p. 101. 194 working on a rabies vaccine: Ibid, pp. 122–123. 195 “acute and harrowing anxiety”: “Historical Perspectives: A Centennial Celebration: Pasteur and the Modern Era of Immunization,” MMWR Weekly 34:389–390, 1985. 195 Pasteur went on to treat 2490 people: Dubos, op. cit., 122–123. 195 Robert Koch: Ibid, p. 106. 195 “magic bullet”: Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of Medicine, New York: Basic Books, 1982, p. 135. 195 Johns Hopkins University: Ibid., p. 115. 196 American Medical Association in 1906: Ibid., p. 118. 196 Flexner Report: Ibid., pp 119–122. 197 Osler wrote a letter: Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, vol. 2, London: Oxford University Press, 1925, pp. 292–293. 197 Flexner himself eventually became disappointed: Starr, op. cit., p. 123. 199 one out of every 200 patients: L.

Part of the problem is that professionals on the front lines of medicine have no reliable way to differentiate between care that is necessary and beneficial and care that has been pushed into use by financial incentives and will not stand the test of time. Much more important, however, is the template of “good medicine” that is permanently imprinted on doctors during their long years of training. Ever since Louis Pasteur discovered that bacteria cause disease, doctors have been committed to the biomedical approach to medicine: the idea that the cause and cure of every symptom and every disease can, with enough research, be understood and successfully treated at its most basic biological level. Modern scientists and doctors find this idea enormously appealing—identify the biological process that has gone awry, and fix it.

There was plenty of time for other diagnostic tests if her symptoms did not respond to these simple measures. THE ROOTS OF THE BIOMEDICAL MODEL In the second half of the nineteenth century, medical science took a giant leap forward. Microbiology, the study of infectious microorganisms, or germs, began shortly after Louis Pasteur accepted a position as chair of the department of chemistry at the University of Lille, in the north of France. The local industry relied upon the precise harnessing of fermentation in the production of beer and wine, and the making of alcohol from beet juice. Pasteur’s work on the industrial problems associated with fermentation led to the discovery that fermentation was caused by live organisms.


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Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

In science and mathematics, there are sometimes eureka moments, after the famous if apocryphal occasion when Archimedes jumped from his bath having discovered the principle of displacement. But even these flashes of inspiration, in which a solution suddenly reveals itself, generally come to people who have been thinking about a problem obliquely for a long time. The nineteenth-century French scientist Louis Pasteur made numerous important scientific discoveries, including that of immunization based on artificial tissue cultures. His method of discovery was oblique: Pasteur observed the effect when a botched experiment by his assistant produced unexpected results. That fortunate accident anticipated the similar obliquity of the most important of all pharmacological discoveries, that of penicillin.

National Park System,” George Wright Forum 24, no. 3 (2007). 7 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (London, Faber & Faber, 1964), p.154. 8 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, Vintage Books, 1975), p. 11. 9 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), p. 350. 10 Louis Pasteur, 1854, quoted in Maurice B. Strauss, Familiar Medical Quotations (London: J & A Churchill, 1968), p. 108. Chapter 7: Muddling Through—Why Oblique Approaches Succeed 1 Charles Lindblom, “The Science of “Muddling Through,” Public Administration Review 19, no. 2 (1959), pp. 79–88. 2 H.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

Bacteria had been known about for a couple of centuries, ever since a Dutch lens grinder named Antony van Leeuwenhoek passed a magnifying glass over a drop of pond water and saw that it was teeming with life, but they had been regarded as a kind of harmless ectoplasm–nobody suspected that they could make people ill. Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France made the connection, starting in the 1850s. The discoveries of these two men are too numerous to list, but among them, Koch showed that TB, the ‘Romantic’ disease of poets and artists, was not inherited–as was widely believed–but caused by a bacterium, while Pasteur disproved the notion that living organisms could be generated spontaneously from inanimate matter.

What the Spanish flu taught us, in essence, is that another flu pandemic is inevitable, but whether it kills 10 million or 100 million will be determined by the world into which it emerges. PART SIX: Science Redeemed René Dujarric de la Rivière in an army laboratory, Calais, 1915 13 Aenigmoplasma influenzae In the dog days of August 1914, an ageing Ilya Mechnikov–Russian exile, Nobel laureate, ‘lieutenant’ of Louis Pasteur and mentor of Yakov Bardakh, Wu Lien-teh and others–battled his way across a Paris in the grip of mobilisation to reach the Pasteur Institute, one of the world’s leading centres for the study of infectious diseases and the production of vaccines. When he arrived, he found it under military command.

They couldn’t see beyond the surface phenomena; now we’re able to look ‘beneath the bonnet’. (One day, science might help us to explain diseases that mystify us today for the same reason, such as autism spectrum disorder.) The revision in how we think about flu seems radical, but perhaps it isn’t as radical as all that. While observing sick silkworms in the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur made two observations: first, that la flacherie, as the worms’ disease was called (literally, ‘flaccidity’–caused by eating contaminated mulberry leaves, it gave them debilitating diarrhoea) was infectious; and second, that offspring could inherit it from their parents. In all the furore over the first observation, the second was overlooked.


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Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi

biodiversity loss, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, data science, food desert, Food sovereignty, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, Skype, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce

(It explains why many have revised a statement Ben Franklin made about wine to “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”12) In order to make beer, people used to backslop the brew—transferring “Goddisgoode” from one fermentation into subsequent batches—hoping God would take care and make a good drink.13 In 1860, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered specific organisms were involved in fermentation, defying conventional wisdom that fermentation was the by-product of the life and death of cells. He, instead, directly linked fermentation to a live organism—yeast. Two decades later, fungus specialist Emil Christian Hansen, working in the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark, found these yeasts were not one, but many, kinds of fungi.14 By isolating a single strain, combining it with sugars and growing more in his laboratory, Hansen produced a pure culture and revolutionized how brewers made beer.

He removed the unpredictability of wild yeast and turned the mystery of fermentation into a replicable, scientific process—one brewers could rely on with or without godly intervention. Saccharomyces, yeast’s scientific classification, literally means “sugar fungus.” The yeast Hansen isolated was called Saccharomyces carlsbergensis (but was later reclassified as Saccharomyces pastorianus in honor of Louis Pasteur) and is still used in beers today.15 These fermentation yeasts were some of the first microbes ever identified, isolated and cultivated. In 1966, Saccharomyces cerevisiae—the species of yeast used for brewing and baking—was the first organism with a nucleus to have its genome completely sequenced.

At its height in the 1850s, Truman’s brewed nine different porters and stouts. It exported beer to the West Indies, North America and Australia, and housed a stable of 200 horses for local deliveries.28 Truman’s was the first British brewery known to have employed a chemist—two decades before Louis Pasteur identified the role of yeast in fermentation.29 However, despite its popularity, beer drinkers’ tastes evolved and, by the 1970s, Truman’s beers started to fall out of favor. “Sadly, the jokes were no longer about the ability of Truman’s beers to put you on the floor. Instead drinkers were asking what the difference was between Ben Truman and a dead frog, and giving the answer: ‘There are more hops in a dead frog.’”30 In 1977, the company tried to catch up to a market that had grown to prefer imported lagers, but their new formulations (featuring different yeasts, malts and hops) never really took hold.


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The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Yet Snow recognized that the experiment was hardly decisive—for example, it might have been that one water company might have served only well-to-do patrons, who were protected for other reasons—and went to great pains to rule out other potential explanations for his results.29 Snow’s findings, together with the later work of Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France, helped establish the germ theory of disease, albeit with much resistance from holdout believers in miasma theory. One sticking point was why some people exposed to the disease did not become sick—a serious challenge to causality and understanding.30 Indeed, Koch, who had isolated Vibrio cholerae in 1883, proposed four “postulates,” all of which had to be satisfied if a microbe were to be safely identified as the cause of a disease.

The germ theory itself led to the identification of a range of causative microorganisms, including the bacteria for anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera in Koch’s laboratories in Germany. Koch was one of the founders of the then new field of microbiology, and his pupils went on to identify the microorganisms responsible for many diseases, including typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and bubonic plague. In the next wave of discovery, Louis Pasteur in Paris demonstrated that microorganisms were responsible for the spoiling of milk and showed how to “pasteurize” milk to prevent it. Pasteur also showed how attenuated versions of infectious microorganisms could be used to develop a range of vaccines. (He also invented Marmite, a basic foodstuff without which life would be impossible for contemporary Britons; we shall meet it again in Chapter 6.)

Even when all the prices are available, people spend their money on different things and in different proportions in different countries. One example will be familiar to anyone—like me—who was brought up in Britain and who now lives elsewhere. One of the basic necessities of existence for Brits is a product called Marmite. This is a (very) salty yeast extract that is a by-product of brewing, originally discovered by Louis Pasteur, who in turn licensed it to a British beer manufacturer. In Britain, Marmite is cheap and widely consumed; it comes in large black pots. In the United States, where I now live, Marmite is available, but it is expensive and comes in very small black pots. Marmite is a well-defined and precisely comparable item that is easily priced in both the United States and Britain.


Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

But published statistics revealed that the rate had risen more than sixfold, from o.3 per million, in only fifteen years. Expanded shipping was transferring rabid animals to and from the New World and Asia. Rabid dogs were even more frightening in growing cities than they had been in the countryside. Louis Pasteur's controversial trials of human rabies vaccine in 1885 and his successful vaccination of thousands of exposed individuals showed how well the specificity of medicine could be mobilized in a crisis. Pasteur had identified the virus responsible for rabies, as well as the sites of the disease, the brain and nervous system.

Like the almost-contemporary Irish potato blight, this was a revenge effect in its own right, a serious problem that a lack of genetic diversity allowed to become a devastating one. France lost five-sixths of its silk output. Production had soared from about 350,000 kilograms in 1805 to over 2.1 million in the early 185os, only to drop again to its 1805 level by 1865. Louis Pasteur's investigations of the two diseases ravaging the silkworms were models of the analysis of parasitism, but even his program for recovery through systematic selection of healthy silkworms left French output at less than half its high point. There seemed to be a boundless opportunity for creating new silk industries, with healthier insects, elsewhere.' 4 By the time Trouvelot began his experiments with moths, every attempt to start producing raw silk in the United States had failed in the long run.

Potatoes, a great benefit for the European popular diet, were genetically vulnerable when grown from a single strain and used as a primary source of nutrition by the very poor. Yet terrible as the Irish potato famine of the 184os was, nothing like it has recurred. The crash of the French raw silk industry in the 185os, so important for Louis Pasteur's career, also showed how dangerous it could be for so many families to link their economic fate to a single organism. It is curious how many resource-rich nations and regions have faltered because they relied too strongly on exploiting only one or two sources of natural wealth. The Mississippi delta, the deserted mining towns of the Rockies, and the desolate coal patches of the Pennsylvania anthracite country all have their counterparts overseas: Sicily, the Ukraine, and Argentina as former world breadbaskets, Romania and Azerbaijan as fabled energy reserves, Zaire and Siberia as gold vaults, the Ruhr as ironworks.


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Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

With that river providing much of the city’s supply of drinking water, Chadwick’s solution only made the problem worse.28 It was not until the episode of the ‘Great Stink’ in 1858, mentioned in Chapter 4, that parliament decided to take decisive action to clean up the river itself. A major programme of upgrading London’s sewerage system was initiated, with waste being pumped downriver of the city’s water intake and flushed out to sea, freeing the city from its periodic cholera outbreaks.29 It would ultimately take the diligent scientific efforts of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch for the germ theory of disease to finally supplant the miasma theory. Their discoveries led not only to efforts by cities around the world to clean up their water supplies, but also to the adoption of basic hygiene practices we now take for granted – like washing hands or cleaning medical implements after use – that play a crucial role in preventing disease transmission.

Inoculation against smallpox became commonplace in Europe early in the nineteenth century after an English country doctor named Edward Jenner discovered that infecting a patient with the far less dangerous cowpox conferred immunity against smallpox. It was not, however, until the late nineteenth century that Louis Pasteur was able to apply the insights of germ theory to create a more systematic approach for weakening bacteria and viruses to make them suitable for inoculations against a wide variety of diseases. Likewise, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics would never have been possible without germ theory.


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The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

In the nineteenth century, most doctors still believed that humoral imbalances caused disease. Before John Snow20 could persuade the local government to close the infected well that caused the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, he had to overcome the common idea that the disease was carried by a miasma, bad air that could upset humoral balance. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch21 had to work hard to convince their colleagues that germs caused diseases like rabies and anthrax, and that they (the germs, not the colleagues) could be targeted and killed. As the microscope and the chemical assay provided incontrovertible evidence of germs and their destruction, doctors were won over to the germ theory, and soon it seemed that they had begun to fulfill Socrates’ dictum to find the natural joints that separated our ills from one another.

So there was really no reason to doubt that patients with genital sores were suffering from a disease different from what patients with a skin rash had, and patients with general paresis, a form of dementia, had yet another illness. There wasn’t even a reason to think that this scheme was based on any a priori principle, that it was anything other than a faithful account of how nature itself sorted diseases. That all changed when some doctors, notably Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, began to insist that there was more to disease than met the unaided eye. Beneath the appearances, the pustules and the fevers and the complaints, was a microbial world populated by the real sources of illness. And if the detectable presence of viruses and bacteria was not convincing enough, the successes of pasteurization and anthrax inoculations soon had doctors abandoning those first principles and peering into microscopes to find the germs that caused diseases.

There are nine symptoms of depression, but patients need have only five in any combination to earn the diagnosis. 18. “another [of] the ten thousand”: Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities,” Part 1, 336. 19. “Love is a madness”: Plato, Phaedrus, 265e. 20. Before John Snow: The best account of this famous story is probably Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. 21. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch: Ullmann, “Pasteur–Koch.” 22. “blessed rage to order”: Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” The Palm at the End of the Mind. 23. Adam and Eve: Genesis 2:19–21. 24. “loose, baggy monster”: Henry James, The Tragic Muse, 4. 25. “insomnia, flushing, drowsiness”: Beard, American Nervousness, 7–8. 26.


Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, driverless car, Edward Jenner, germ theory of disease, helicopter parent, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, placebo effect, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, wikimedia commons, Y2K

In the seventeenth century, an Italian scholar named Ramazzini claimed, “It seems as if the phlebotomist [bloodletter] grasped the Delphic Sword in his hand to exterminate the innocent.” By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opposition from many physicians and scientists began to turn the tide of change. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch showed that inflammation came from infection and wouldn’t be cured with bloodletting. In 1855, John Hughes Bennett, a physician from Edinburgh, used statistics to show that pneumonia mortality decreased as bloodletting declined. With the current understanding of human physiology and pathology, medical practices in the West began to move away from the antiquated ideas of humoral medicine.

When the students switched wards, the horrible death rates followed the medical students and their bacteria-laden hands. The physician Ignaz Semmelweis, observing this, had the staff do something simple but miraculous: wash their hands with soap and a chlorine solution. Voilà—death rates plummeted. But tragically, no one listened. In the nineteenth century, Joseph Lister built upon microbiologist Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease and eventually revolutionized surgery by introducing the concept of antisepsis. Many poo-pooed the idea of bacteria. An Edinburgh professor snorted, “Where are these little beasts . . . has anyone seen them yet?” Another surgeon insisted that “there is good reason to believe that the theory of M.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Our success in finding new information and sources of inspiration increasingly depends upon serendipity—the chance encounter with someone or something that we did not even know existed, much less had value, but that proves to be extraordinarily relevant and helpful once we find out about it. But it turns out that these “serendipitous” events are not always just chance. Louis Pasteur famously observed, “Fortune favors the prepared mind,” but this still assumes that the initial encounter is pure luck and that it is only a question of being prepared for luck when it happens. What if it is possible to shape those unexpected encounters so that we could increase the probability and quality of the encounters?

By phoning up the videographer beforehand, as Dusty did, even if we don’t know what good might come from it; by moving to Silicon Valley or some other spike of complementary talent; by being appropriately open with our personal and professional information on social networking sites—in all these ways we can enhance the potential for attracting serendipitous encounters. In other words, we can shape serendipity rather than waiting passively for it to occur. Following Louis Pasteur’s advice, we can work to prepare ourselves. We can reach out, make interesting connections—often for their own sake. But doing this requires an understanding of the areas where the most valuable new ideas, insights, and experiences are likely to surface so that we can position ourselves for serendipity.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

So at least 9,000 years ago—but almost certainly much earlier—a human history of alcohol was added to the natural history of spontaneous fermentations in rotting fruits and berries. It began when the first winemaker or brewer crushed grapes or other fruit, or processed barley or another cereal, and let the liquid stand until it fermented. Fermentation was not explained as a biological process until the middle of the nineteenth century, when French scientist Louis Pasteur carried out his experiments with wine. Yet thousands of years earlier, someone, somewhere—northeastern China and western Asia are currently considered the most likely locations—seems to have made a historic observation: if the juice of fruit or berries (or a mixture of water and honey or processed cereal) were left for a short time in warm enough conditions, it began to bubble or froth.

In other words, when “wine” was associated with good things in the Bible, it was grape juice, but when “wine” was associated with immorality, it was wine. As they felt it would be blasphemous to represent Christ by wine, teetotalers began a campaign to persuade churches to replace communion wine with grape juice. A structural development assisted the teetotalers in this endeavor. Louis Pasteur and other scientists who carried out research on fermentation discovered that heating up grape juice (the process later known as pasteurization) killed off the yeasts needed to turn its sugars into alcohol. This enabled the production of a stable juice that was free from the risk of fermentation.

No sector of the population that was perceived as able to drink more wine was spared the attention of the campaign. Young men would learn wine-drinking while they did military service. Over the objections of some teachers’ groups—and, of course, temperance associations—the campaign even reached into France’s schools. When children took dictation, they would copy out Louis Pasteur’s dicta on the health benefits of wine, and when they took geography lessons, they would learn the location of France’s wine regions. Mathematics classes included equations such as “One liter of wine at ten degrees [alcohol-level] corresponds as a food-stuff to 900 grams of milk, 370 grams of bread, 585 grams of meat, and five eggs.”


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

The infrastructure and design of this network of networks do play a certain role in sanctioning many of these myths—for example, the idea that “the Internet” is resistant to censorship comes from the unique qualities of its packet-switching communication mechanism—but “the Internet” that is the bane of public debates also contains many other stories and narratives—about innovation, surveillance, capitalism—that have little to do with the infrastructure per se. French philosopher Bruno Latour, writing of Louis Pasteur’s famed scientific accomplishments, distinguished between Pasteur, the actual historical figure, and “Pasteur,” the mythical almighty character who has come to represent the work of other scientists and entire social movements, like the hygienists, who, for their own pragmatic reasons, embraced Pasteur with open arms.

French philosopher Bruno Latour, writing of Louis Pasteur’s famed scientific accomplishments, distinguished between Pasteur, the actual historical figure, and “Pasteur,” the mythical almighty character who has come to represent the work of other scientists and entire social movements, like the hygienists, who, for their own pragmatic reasons, embraced Pasteur with open arms. But anyone interested in writing the history of that period cannot just deploy the name “Pasteur” as an unproblematic, objective term; it needs to be disassembled so that its various parts can be studied in their own right. The story of how these disparate parts—including the actual Louis Pasteur—have become “Pasteur,” the national hero of France whom we see in textbooks, is what the history of science, at least in its Latourian vision, should aspire to uncover. Now, I do not set out to write history in this book. If I did, I would indeed try to show the contingency and fluidity of the very idea of “the Internet” and attempt to trace how “the Internet” has come to mean what it means today.

Having closely studied evidence for all four of these changes, Worboys concludes that “historians have read into the 1880s changes that occurred over a much longer period, and that while there were significant shifts in ideas and practices over the decade, the balance of continuities and changes was quite uneven across medicine.” Note that Worboys doesn’t deny the importance of contributions made by Robert Koch or Louis Pasteur (well, “Pasteur” is probably more like it)—he just points out that the actual way in which these discoveries transformed the medical practice was much more convoluted; it was anything but predetermined or inevitable. Such subtle accounts that seek to acknowledge important changes without falling into the epochalist mode are very hard to find in Internet studies.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Sure, it was totally bootstrapped—our campus borrowed, our faculty on loan (made up of the professors Bob, Todd and I recruited and borrowed from our respective alma maters). Yet it was still a complete success Then we did it again, changing only the location (so we could create engagement in wider and wider communities). During that second summer, ISU borrowed the Université Louis Pasteur campus in Strasbourg, France. Then we were off to Toronto, Canada, in 1990, Toulouse, France, in 1991, and Kitakyushu, Japan, in 1992. After the university had five years and about 550 alumni under its belt, we finally decided to try and parlay our assets into step 4 of our vision—a permanent terrestrial campus.

., 27 LIDAR, 43–44, 44 life-extension projects, 66, 81 Li’l Abner (comic strip), 71 Lincoln, Abraham, 109, 194 Lindbergh, Charles, 112, 244, 245, 259–60 linear growth, 7, 9 linear industries, 38, 116 exponential technologies in disrupting of, 17, 18–22 linear organizations, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 76, 85, 116 LinkedIn, 77, 213, 231 Lintott, Chris, 220 Linux, 11, 163 Littler Workplace Policy Institute, 60 live-streaming, in crowdsourcing campaigns, 207 Lloyd, Gareth, 4 Local Motors, 33, 217, 223–25, 231, 238, 240, 241 Locke, Edwin, 23, 74, 75, 103 Lockheed, 71–72, 75 Lockheed Martin, 249 Longitude Prize, 245, 247, 267 long-term thinking, 116, 128, 130–31, 132–33, 138 Los Angeles, Calif., 258 loss aversion, 121 Louis Pasteur Université, 104 Lovins, Amory, 222 MacCready, Paul, 263 McDowell, Mike, 291n machine learning, 54–55, 58, 66, 85, 137, 167, 216 see also artificial intelligence (AI) Macintosh computer, 72 McKinsey & Company, 245 McLucas, John, 102 Macondo Prospect, 250 macrotasks, crowdsourcing of, 156, 157–58 Made in Space, 36–37 Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Heath and Heath), 248 MakerBot printers, 39 Makers (Doctorow), 38 MakieLabs, 39 manufacturing, 33, 41 biological, 63–64 digital, 33 in DIY communities, 223–25 robotics in, 62 subtractive vs. additive, 29–30, 31 3–D printing’s impact on, 30, 31, 34–35 Marines, US, 222 Markoff, John, 56 Mars missions, 99, 118–19, 128 Mars Oasis project, 118 Maryland, University of, 74 Maryniak, Gregg, 244 Mashable, 238 massively transformative purpose (MTP), 215, 221, 230, 231, 233, 240, 242, 274 in incentive competitions, 249, 255, 263, 265, 270 mastery, 79, 80, 85, 87, 92 materials, in crowdfunding campaigns, 195 Maven Research, 145 Maxwell, John, 114n Mead, Margaret, 247 Mechanical Turk, 157 meet-ups, 237 Menlo Ventures, 174 message boards, 164 Mexican entrepreneurs, 257–58 Michigan, University of, 135, 136 microfactories, 224, 225 microlending, 172 microprocessors, 49, 49 Microsoft, 47, 50, 99 Microsoft Windows, 27 Microsoft Word, 11 microtasks, crowdsourcing of, 156–57, 166 Mightybell, 217, 233 Migicovsky, Eric, 175–78, 186, 191, 193, 198, 199, 200, 206, 209 Millington, Richard, 233 Mims, Christopher, 290n MIT, 27, 60, 100, 101, 103, 291n mobile devices, 14, 42, 42, 46, 46, 47, 49, 124, 125, 135, 146, 163, 176 see also smartphones Modernizing Medicine, 57 monetization: in incentive competitions, 263 of online communities, 241–42 Montessori education, 89 moonshot goals, 81–83, 93, 98, 103, 104, 110, 245, 248 Moore, Gordon, 7 Moore’s Law, 6–7, 9, 12, 31, 64 Mophie, 18 moral leadership, 274–76 Morgan Stanley, 122, 132 Mosaic, 27, 32, 33, 57 motivation, science of, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103 incentive competitions and, 148, 254, 255, 262–63 Murphy’s Law, 107–8 Museum of Flight (Seattle), 205 music industry, 11, 20, 124, 125, 127, 161 Musk, Elon, xiii, 73, 97, 111, 115, 117–23, 128, 134, 138, 139, 167, 223 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 119–23, 127 Mycoskie, Blake, 80 Mycroft, Frank, 180 MySQL, 163 Napoléon I, Emperor of France, 245 Napster, 11 Narrative Science, 56 narrow framing, 121 NASA, 96, 97, 100, 102, 110, 123, 221, 228, 244 Ames Research Center of, 58 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of, 99 Mars missions of, 99, 118 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 226 National Institutes of Health, 64, 227 National Press Club, 251 navigation, in online communities, 232 Navteq, 47 Navy Department, US, 72 NEAR Shoemaker mission, 97 Netflix, 254, 255 Netflix Prize, 254–56 Netscape, 117, 143 networks and sensors, x, 14, 21, 24, 41–48, 42, 45, 46, 66, 275 information garnered by, 42–43, 44, 47, 256 in robotics, 60, 61 newcomer rituals, 234 Newman, Tom, 268 New York Times, xii, 56, 108, 133, 145, 150, 155, 220 Nickell, Jake, 143, 144 99designs, 145, 158, 166, 195 Nivi, Babak, 174 Nokia, 47 Nordstrom, 72 Nye, Bill, 180, 200, 207 “Oatmeal, the” (web comic), 178, 179, 193, 196, 200 Oculus Rift, 182 O’Dell, Jolie, 238–39 oil-cleanup projects, 247, 250–53, 262, 263, 264 Olguin, Carlos, 65 1Qbit, 59 operational assets, crowdsourcing of, 158–60 Orteig Prize, 244, 245, 259, 260, 263 Oxford Martin School, 62 Page, Carl, 135 Page, Gloria, 135 Page, Larry, xiii, 53, 74, 81, 84, 99, 100, 115, 126, 128, 134–39, 146 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 136–38 PageRank algorithm, 135 parabolic flights, 110–12, 123 Paramount Pictures, 151 Parliament, British, 245 passion, importance of, 106–7, 113, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134, 174, 180, 183, 184, 248, 249 in online communities, 224, 225, 228, 231, 258 PayPal, 97, 117–18, 167, 201 PC Tools, 150 Pebble Watch campaign, 174, 175–78, 179, 182, 186, 187, 191, 200, 206, 208, 209, 210 pitch video in, 177, 198, 199 peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, 172 Pelton, Joseph, 102 personal computers (PCs), 26, 76 Peter’s Laws, 108–14 PHD Comics, 200 philanthropic prizes, 267 photography, 3–6, 10, 15 demonetization of, 12, 15 see also digital cameras; Kodak Corporation Pink, Daniel, 79 Pishevar, Shervin, 174 pitch videos, 177, 180, 192, 193, 195, 198–99, 203, 212 Pivot Power, 19 Pixar, 89, 111 Planetary Resources, Inc., 34, 95, 96, 99, 109, 172, 175, 179, 180, 186, 189–90, 193, 195, 201–3, 221, 228, 230 Planetary Society, 190, 200 Planetary Vanguards, 180, 201–3, 212, 230 PlanetLabs, 286n +Pool, 171 Polaroid, 5 Polymath Project, 145 Potter, Gavin, 255–56 premium memberships, 242 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 146 Prime Movers, The (Locke), 23 Princeton University, 128–29, 222 Prius, 221 probabilistic thinking, 116, 121–22, 129 process optimization, 48 Project Cyborg, 65 psychological tools, of entrepreneurs, 67, 115, 274 goal setting in, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 93, 103–4, 112, 137, 185–87 importance of, 73 line of super-credibility and, 96, 98–99, 98, 100, 101–2, 107, 190, 203, 266, 272 passion as important in, 106–7, 113, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134, 174, 249, 258 Peter’s Laws in, 108–14 and power of constraints, 248–49 rapid iteration and, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86, 120, 126, 133–34, 236 risk management and, see risk management science of motivation and, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103, 254, 255 in skunk methodology, 71–87, 88; see also skunk methodology staging of bold ideas and, 103–4, 107 for thinking at scale, see scale, thinking at triggering flow and, 85–94, 109 public relations managers, in crowdfunding campaigns, 193–94 purpose, 79, 85, 87, 116, 119–20 in DIY communities, see massively transformative purpose (MTP) Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, 253 Quirky, 18–20, 21, 66, 161 Rackspace, 50, 257 Rally Fighter, 224, 225 rapid iteration, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86, 236 feedback loops in, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90–91, 92, 120 in thinking at scale, 116, 126, 133–34 rating systems, 226, 232, 236–37, 240 rationally optimistic thinking, 116, 136–37 Ravikant, Naval, 174 Raytheon, 72 re:Invent 2012, 76–77 reCAPTCHA, 154–55, 156, 157 registration, in online communities, 232 Reichental, Avi, 30–32, 35 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 4 reputation economics, 217–19, 230, 232, 236–37 Ressi, Adeo, 118 ReverbNation, 161 reward-based crowdfunding, 173, 174–80, 183, 185, 186–87, 195, 205, 207 case studies in, 174–80 designing right incentives for affiliates in, 200 early donor engagement in, 203–5 fundraising targets in, 186–87, 191 setting of incentives in, 189–91, 189 telling meaningful story in, 196–98 trend surfing in, 208 upselling in, 207, 208–9 see also crowdfunding, crowdfunding campaigns rewards, extrinsic vs. intrinsic, 78–79 Rhodin, Michael, 56 Richards, Bob, 100, 101–2, 103, 104 Ridley, Matt, 137 risk management, 76–77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 103, 109, 116, 121 Branson’s strategies for, 126–27 flow and, 87, 88, 92, 93 incentive competitions and, 247, 248–49, 261, 270 in thinking at scale, 116, 121–22, 126–27, 137 Robinson, Mark, 144 Robot Garden, 62 robotics, x, 22, 24, 35, 41, 59–62, 63, 66, 81, 135, 139 entrepreneurial opportunities in, 60, 61, 62 user interfaces in, 60–61 Robot Launchpad, 62 RocketHub, 173, 175, 184 Rogers, John “Jay,” 33, 38, 222–25, 231, 238, 240 Roomba, 60, 66 Rose, Geordie, 58 Rose, Kevin, 120 Rosedale, Philip, 144 Russian Federal Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 76, 96, 112, 127, 269 San Antonio Mix Challenge, 257–58 Sandberg, Sheryl, 217, 237 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 3 Sasson, Steven, 4–5, 5, 6, 9 satellite technology, 14, 36–37, 44, 100, 127, 275, 286n scale, thinking at, xiii, 20–21, 116, 119, 125–28, 148, 225, 228, 243, 257 Bezos’s strategies for, 128, 129, 130–33 Branson’s strategies for, 125–27 in building online communities, 232–33 customer-centric approach in, 116, 126, 128, 130, 131–32, 133 first principles in, 116, 120–21, 122, 126, 138 long-term thinking and, 116, 128, 130–31, 132–33, 138 Musk’s strategies for, 119–23, 127 Page’s strategies for, 136–38 passion and purpose in, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134 probabilistic thinking and, 116, 121–22, 129 rapid iteration in, 116, 126, 133–34 rationally optimistic thinking and, 116, 136–37 risk management in, 116, 121–22, 126–27, 137 Scaled Composites, 262 Schawinski, Kevin, 219–21 Schmidt, Eric, 99, 128, 251 Schmidt, Wendy, 251, 253 Schmidt Family Foundation, 251 science of motivation, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103 incentive competitions and, 148, 254, 255, 262–63 Screw It, Let’s Do It (Branson), 125 Scriptlance, 149 Sealed Air Corporation, 30–31 Second Life, 144 SecondMarket, 174 “secrets of skunk,” see skunk methodology Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), US, 172 security-related sensors, 43 sensors, see networks and sensors Shapeways.com, 38 Shingles, Marcus, 159, 245, 274–75 Shirky, Clay, 215 ShotSpotter, 43 Simply Music, 258 Singh, Narinder, 228 Singularity University (SU), xi, xii, xiv, 15, 35, 37, 53, 61, 73, 81, 85, 136, 169, 278, 279 Six Ds of Exponentials, 7–15, 8, 17, 20, 25 deception phase in, 8, 9, 10, 24, 25–26, 29, 30, 31, 41, 59, 60 dematerialization in, 8, 10, 11–13, 14, 15, 20–21, 66 democratization in, 8, 10, 13–15, 21, 33, 51–52, 59, 64–65, 276 demonetization in, 8, 10–11, 14, 15, 52, 64–65, 138, 163, 167, 223 digitalization in, 8–9, 10 disruption phase in, 8, 9–10, 20, 24, 25, 29, 32, 33–35, 37, 38, 39, 256; see also disruption, exponential Skonk Works, 71, 72 skunk methodology, 71–87, 88 goal setting in, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 103 Google’s use of, 81–84 isolation in, 72, 76, 78, 79, 81–82, 257 “Kelly’s rules” in, 74, 75–76, 77, 81, 84, 247 rapid iteration approach in, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86 risk management in, 76–77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88 science of motivation and, 78–80, 85, 87, 92 triggering flow with, 86, 87 Skunk Works, 72, 75 Skybox, 286n Skype, 11, 13, 167 Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 219–20 Small Business Association, US, 169 smartphones, x, 7, 12, 14, 15, 42, 135, 283n apps for, 13, 13, 15, 16, 28, 47, 176 information gathering with, 47 SmartThings, 48 smartwatches, 176–77, 178, 191, 208 software development, 77, 144, 158, 159, 161, 236 in exponential communities, 225–28 SolarCity, 111, 117, 119, 120, 122 Space Adventures Limited, 96, 291n space exploration, 81, 96, 97–100, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 134, 139, 230, 244 asteroid mining in, 95–96, 97–99, 107, 109, 179, 221, 276 classifying of galaxies and, 219–21, 228 commercial tourism projects in, 96–97, 109, 115, 119, 125, 127, 244, 246, 261, 268 crowdfunding campaigns for, see ARKYD Space Telescope campaign incentive competitions in, 76, 96, 109, 112, 115, 127, 134, 139, 246, 248–49, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 International Space University and, 96, 100–104, 107–8 Mars missions in, 99, 118–19, 128 see also aerospace industry Space Fair, 291n “space selfie,” 180, 189–90, 196, 208 SpaceShipOne, 96, 97, 127, 269 SpaceShipTwo, 96–97 SpaceX, 34, 111, 117, 119, 122, 123 Speed Stick, 152, 154 Spiner, Brent, 180, 200, 207 Spirit of St.


pages: 431 words: 99,919

Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome by Will Bulsiewicz

autism spectrum disorder, David Strachan, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, randomized controlled trial, traumatic brain injury, ultra-processed food, zero-sum game

Modernization and the origins of modern epidemics In the late nineteenth century the average life expectancy was just forty-seven years and the top causes of death were infections. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, typhus, and syphilis were rampant. Heart disease and cancer were there, but a small problem compared to infections. Thanks to Louis Pasteur’s discovery of what we now call modern germ theory, we finally understood that behind the top causes of death is a germ. In response, bacteria became public enemy numbers one, two, and three. So what are you going to do about it? Well, we did what humans have always done at every stage of human history—we innovated to find a solution to the problem in front of us.

It was tangy and acidic, too—and delicious. I took more bites. Many more. I was in fermented nirvana. It’s been a daily part of my life ever since. The bacterial artistry behind fermentation and healthy soil Perhaps you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about food decomposition, but this is exactly what Louis Pasteur was thinking about when he discovered modern germ theory in the 1860s. By studying how wine is created from grapes and how milk spoils, he started to understand that microorganisms are at the heart of all of it. Understanding the process of food decomposition is an important part of assessing the nutritional value of our food.


pages: 371 words: 108,105

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon

Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

No one believed, however, that something as simple as washing your hands could make the difference between life and death and Semmelweis was dismissed as mad. (It did not help that he unfortunately suffered from a neurological disorder that was gradually driving him insane.) Semmelweis’s basic principle of hygiene was not accepted until Louis Pasteur exposed bacteria as the cause of disease and Joseph Lister was the first, in 1865, to prevent the infection of a surgical wound by using an antiseptic. Though revolutionary, these methods were, initially, very painful, because of the corrosive effect of disinfectant in the wound and the length of time they took to administer.

After Pedoux was discharged, Péan did not see his patient at all for another year. This is in itself remarkable – that a renowned surgeon would allow a simple baker to walk off with an upper arm full of platinum (though this precious metal was not considered very valuable at that time). Why was he so optimistic about this shoulder prosthesis? Louis Pasteur had already proved thirty years earlier that bacteria were responsible for causing diseases and, ten years earlier, Robert Koch had discovered the bacillus that caused tuberculosis. And yet, Péan could not have known much about the mechanism the human body employs to defend itself against intruding bacteria.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

He preserved a whole sheep in a crock just to show it off. His solution preserved nutrients so well that scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency known as “the sailor’s nightmare,” went from deadly curse to avoidable nuisance. The main scientific epiphany—heat kills microbes—was still sixty years from being discovered by Louis Pasteur. Appert’s method revolutionized public health, and, unfortunately for Napoleon, crossed the English Channel. In 1815, it fed the English troops at Waterloo. Alph Bingham’s critics were aware that clever outsiders and dilettantes had made technical breakthroughs in the past, but they assumed it was purely that, an artifact of the past that would not translate into the era of hyperspecialization.

If a title did not directly pertain to the creation of a new commercial technology, she whisked it from the stack and asked the room how exactly that sort of thing would help the country get ahead of India and China. Among the disciplines Hutchison classified as distracting from technological innovation were biology, geology, economics, and archaeology. One can only guess how she would have assessed the work of Louis Pasteur (who started as an artist) on chickens with cholera, which led him to lab-created vaccines. Or Einstein’s fanciful idea to investigate if time passes differently in high versus low gravity, part of a theory essential to some rather useful technology, like cell phones, which use global positioning satellites with gravitationally adjusted clocks that sync with clocks on Earth.


pages: 376 words: 110,321

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, British Empire, cotton gin, Easter island, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Motors Futurama, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kitchen Debate, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, refrigerator car, scientific management, sexual politics, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E

No wonder it was hard work: the work of the stillroom was a kind of magic, a staving off of decay comparable to the embalming of the dead. The most remarkable thing about fruit preserves was the fact that they really did preserve the fruit (at least, most of the time). Throughout history, cooks have aimed to make food safe to eat; and often, they succeeded. Yet until the 1860s, when Louis Pasteur uncovered the microorganisms responsible for spoiling food and drink, cooks had no real knowledge of why food preservation worked. The prevailing view was that decomposition was caused by spontaneous generation, in other words, that mysterious unseen forces caused the mold to grow. People knew nothing of microbes, the living organisms—fungi, bacteria, and yeasts, among others—that cause beneficial fermentation in wine and cheese, and toxic fermentation when food degrades.

In 1852, thousands of cans of meat supplied to the British navy were inspected and found to be unfit to eat, “their contents being masses of putrefaction” causing a dreadful “stench” when opened. It was generally assumed that canned meat spoiled because “air has penetrated into the canister, or was not originally entirely exhausted.” Until Louis Pasteur, it wasn’t known that there is a class of microbe that can flourish without air: to kill these, the crucial factor is thorough heating. The original size of cans had been around 2 to 4 pounds (as against ¼ to 1 pound for average cans today); these navy cans were massive, holding on average 10 pounds of meat.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Indeed, these exceptions are often the most momentous discoveries in science.’ History is, of course, littered with mavericks initially ridiculed or dismissed and later (sometimes much later) accepted as geniuses: including Charles Darwin (evolution), Gregor Mendel (genetic inheritance), Robert Goddard (liquid-fuelled rockets), Louis Pasteur (germ theory) and the Wright brothers (powered flight). Then again, the past is also full of challenges to accepted wisdom which crashed and burned. I give you James McConnell and Georges Ungar, who believed that memories were encoded in molecules and could therefore be transferred from one animal to another – giving rise to the possibility that you could take a pill and go on to recall the complete works of Shakespeare.

A final motivation for collecting all this genomic data is similar to the reason chefs buy lots of cookbooks – to add to their repertoire of dishes and get ideas for how to cook new ones. The next day I head to the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in the Fenway area of Boston. It’s a slightly oppressive slab of glass and concrete, sited, appropriately, on Avenue Louis Pasteur – named after the iconic Frenchman who gave us pasteurised milk as well as the experiments that would prove to the world that diseases could be caused by ‘germs’ (critters like the bacteria and viruses that George Church’s work has helped unmask and force to give up their genetic secrets). As I approach I’m assaulted by a plethora of signs that announce, sombrely and rather patronisingly, ‘Let’s Be Clear.


pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

The mere notion that doctors could be responsible for bringing death, not life, to their patients caused huge offence, and Semmelweis was cast out of the establishment. Women continued to risk their lives giving birth for decades, as they paid the price of the doctors’ arrogance. Twenty years later, the great Frenchman Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, which attributed infection and illness to microbes, not miasma. In 1884, Pasteur’s theory was proved by the elegant experiments of the German Nobel prize-winning doctor Robert Koch. By this time, Semmelweis was long dead. He had become obsessed by childbed fever, and had gone mad with rage and desperation.

Far be it from me to critique the degree of adherence to the scientific method of a Nobel prize-winner, but Metchnikoff’s dabblings in intestinal microbiology, in this book at least, barely met reasonable standards of repeatability, comparison against a control, or concerns of causation. His scientific coming-of-age coincided with a period of history in which medical scientists were overcome with excitement about the research avenues opened up by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory. Hypotheses thrived, and little time or mental energy was devoted to patient study, experimentation or evidence-building before the new cohort of medical microbiologists bounded off, tails wagging, to sniff out new ideas. Nonetheless, the media, the public and a slew of charlatans jumped on the autointoxication bandwagon in the early twentieth century.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

In his reply, Einstein cited his ability to spot anomalies that others miss: “When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved,” he explained, implicitly referring to his theory of relativity. “I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”52 But luck, to paraphrase Louis Pasteur, favors the prepared. Only when we pay attention to the subtle clues—there’s something off with the data, the explanation seems cursory or superficial, the observation doesn’t quite fit the theory—can the old paradigm give way to the new. As we’ll see in the next section, just as the embrace of uncertainty leads to progress, progress itself generates uncertainty, as one discovery calls into question the other.

When it comes to boosting creativity, cognitive diversity—blending together your version of scientists and engineers—isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a necessity. But there’s another level of cognitive diversity that often gets overlooked. Beginner’s Mind In the 1860s, the silk industry in France was endangered by a disease that threatened silkworms. Chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas urged his former student, Louis Pasteur, to work on the problem. Pasteur was hesitant. “But I never worked with silkworms,” he protested. Dumas replied, “So much the better.”82 Most of us don’t do what Dumas did. We instinctively dismiss the opinions of amateurs like Pasteur. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t attended the relevant meetings.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Planet Earth was ready to move on to its next ambitious phase. But before we get too excited about that, it is worth remembering that the world, as we are about to see, still belongs to the very small. 20 SMALL WORLD IT'S PROBABLY NOT a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumably did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner. In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive.

Brown, who lived from 1773 to 1858, called it nucleus from the Latin nucula, meaning little nut or kernel. Not until 1839, however, did anyone realize that all living matter is cellular. It was Theodor Schwann, a German, who had this insight, and it was not only comparatively late, as scientific insights go, but not widely embraced at first. It wasn't until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from preexisting cells. The belief became known as the “cell theory,” and it is the basis of all modern biology. The cell has been compared to many things, from “a complex chemical refinery” (by the physicist James Trefil) to “a vast, teeming metropolis” (the biochemist Guy Brown).

Margulis and Sagan, p. 17. 32 “you could pack a billion . . .” Brown, The Energy of Life, p. 101. 33 “Such fossils have been found just once . . .” Ward and Brownlee, p. 10. 34 “little more than ‘bags of chemicals'. . .” Drury, p. 68. 35 “to fill eighty books of five hundred pages.” Sagan, p. 227. CHAPTER 20 SMALL WORLD 1 “Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist . . .” Biddle, p. 16. 2 “a herd of about one trillion bacteria . . .” Ashcroft, p. 248; and Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p. 4. 3 “Your digestive system alone . . .” Biddle, p. 57. 4 “no detectable function at all.” National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 51. 5 “about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells.”


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century public health benefited by characterizing the tobacco industry and polluters as sources of cancer threat to the community, fast-food distributors as heart disease promoters, and radiation emitters as creators of deformed babies. But the links were never as strong, either scientifically or politically, as those Biggs, France’s Louis Pasteur, and their contemporaries made between germs and infectious diseases. Public health in the wealthy world, therefore, struggled to maintain respect, funding, and self-definition in the late twentieth century. It was no coincidence that one hundred years previously the precious concept of public health arose in New York City, as it was the world’s center of nineteenth-and twentieth-century globalization.

While civic leaders targeted hogs, dirt, and horse manure, more sophisticated notions of disease were percolating overseas: talk of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was on everyone’s lips. Rudolf Virchow in 1858 published Die Cellularpathologie, which drew from his extensive laboratory studies to demonstrate that human illness functioned at the cellular level. The following year in Paris, Dr. Claude Bernard published the first modern book of human physiology. And in 1862 Louis Pasteur had published in France his theory of the existence of “germs,” which, he argued, were key to fermentation. But America was focused on the Civil War. By far the majority of the 535,000 deceased soldiers were victims of disease or the hideous health care practices that resulted in the amputation of most injured limbs and proved fatal to 62 percent of those with chest wounds and 87 percent with abdominal wounds.41 While public health improved in most other northeastern cities, save among soldiers, New York’s stagnated.

Further, the sanitarians, among whom Christian moralists predominated, were slow to note advances in science. But advances there were indeed. Antiseptics were discovered in 1870 by England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who found that by pouring carbolic acid on a wound or a suture site, infection would never take hold there. Beginning in 1876 Drs. Robert Koch in Berlin and Louis Pasteur in Paris were racing to identify the individual germs that caused disease.50 In 1880 Pasteur published his landmark Germ Theory of Disease, in which he argued that all contagious diseases were caused by microscopic organisms that damaged the human victim at the cellular level—as Rudolf Virchow had argued—and spread from person to person.


pages: 476 words: 120,892

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

But vitalism was undermined by the work of several nineteenth-century scientists who succeeded in isolating chemicals from living cells that were identical to those synthesized in the laboratory. For example, in 1828 the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler managed to synthesize urea, a biochemical that had previously been thought to be peculiar to living cells. Louis Pasteur even succeeded in reproducing chemical transformations, such as fermentation, previously thought to be unique to life, by using extracts from living cells (later called enzymes). Increasingly, the matter of the living appeared to be made up from pretty much the same chemicals that made up the nonliving, and thereby likely to be governed by the same chemistry.

When he recovered the capsules he discovered that the meat was completely digested, despite the fact that, protected within the metal, it could not have been subject to any mechanical action. Descartes’s cogs, levers and grinders were clearly insufficient to account for at least one of life’s vital forces. A century after de Réaumur’s work, another Frenchman, the chemist and founder of microbiology Louis Pasteur, studied another biological transformation hitherto attributed to “vital forces”: the conversion of grape juice into wine. He showed that the transforming principle of fermentation appeared to be intrinsically associated with living yeast cells that were present in the “ferments” used in the brewing industry, or in the leaven used to make bread.


pages: 412 words: 122,952

Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, Copley Medal, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, William of Occam

Curtis had removed himself from big telescope access; Shapley refused to consider that spirals could be huge stellar systems. Only Hubble pursued the question with dogged effort and even he had been looking for novae at first, not Cepheids in particular. Luck certainly played a small role, but as Louis Pasteur once put it, “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” Once the news was out, reporters couldn't get enough of the tall and broad-shouldered Major Hubble, as they often addressed him. He was turning into an accomplished popular communicator. “There is just not one universe,” Hubble told a local journalist about his discovery.

Sandage (2004), pp. 495–98. 217 “spiral nebulae” were on his agenda and that “cosmogony” would be his future field: HUA, Shapley to Kellogg, June 10, 1920, and December 1, 1920. 217 “The work that Hubble did on galaxies was very largely using my methods”: Shapley (1969), pp. 57–58. 217 “in the fields of observation”: Louis Pasteur, Inaugural Lecture, University of Lillé, December 7, 1854. 218 “There is just not one universe”: HUB, Box 28, Scrapbook. 218 catchiest headline: Ibid. 218 “more systems of stars than there are hairs in the whiskers of Santa Claus”: Blades (1930), p. J10. 218 “Professor Edwin Hubble announces that he has found another universe”: “The Universe, Inc.” (1926), 133. 218 “Astronomy, as a matter of popular interest”: “Crowd Jams Library for Hubble Talk” (1927). 218 “It is like looking at those lights”: Blakeslee (1930). 218 did by chance discover “Comet Hubble” in August 1937: HUB, 100-inch Logbook. 218 “I am commuting to a spiral nebula”: HUB, Box 8, biographical memoir. 219 “astronomy is a science in which exact truth is ever stranger than fiction”: Jeans (1929), p. 8. 219 “How terrifying!


pages: 141 words: 46,879

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, job satisfaction, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, out of africa, phenotype

Perhaps here is an opportunity for "like begets like"-for chemical heredity. Could right-handed molecules spawn right-handed daughter molecules and left-handers spawn southpaw daughter molecules? First, some background information on mirror-image molecules. The phenomenon was first discovered by the great nineteenth-century French scientist Louis Pasteur, who was looking at crystals of tartrate, which is a salt of tartaric acid, an important substance in wine. A crystal is a solid edifice, big enough to be seen with the naked eye and, in some cases, worn around the neck. It is formed when atoms or molecules, all of the same type, pile on top of one another to form a solid.


pages: 184 words: 54,833

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

This was where Orwell suffered the premonitory pangs of a man living under a police regime: a police regime ruling in the name of socialism and the people. For a Westerner, at least, this epiphany was a relatively novel thing; it brushed the sleeves of many thoughtful and humane people, who barely allowed it to interrupt their preoccupation with the ‘main enemy’, fascism. But on Orwell it made a permanent impression. Coincidence, said Louis Pasteur, has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it. He was speaking of the kind of openness of mind that allows elementary scientific innovation to occur, but the metaphor is a serviceable one. Orwell was, to an extent, conditioned to keep his eyes open in Spain, and to register the evidence.


pages: 369 words: 153,018

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane

Benoit Mandelbrot, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwork universe, double helix, Drosophila, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, out of africa, phenotype, power law, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, stem cell, unbiased observer

By the nineteenth century, the students of fermentation split into two camps—those who thought that fermentation was a living process with a function (mostly the vitalists, who believed in a special vital force, irreducible to ‘mere’ chemistry), and those who considered fermentation to be purely a chemical process (mostly the chemists themselves). The century-long feud appeared to be settled by Louis Pasteur, a vitalist, who demonstrated that yeast was composed of living cells, and that fermentation was carried out by these cells in the absence of oxygen. Indeed Pasteur famously described fermentation as ‘life without oxygen’. As a vitalist, Pasteur was convinced that fermentation must have a purpose, which is to say, a function that was beneficial in some way for yeast, but even he admitted to being ‘completely in the dark’ about what this purpose might have been.

It doesn’t sound very likely to me, especially given the tendency of ultraviolet radiation to break down complex organic molecules in the days before the ozone layer. Second, the perception of fermentation as simple and primitive is wrong. It reflects our prejudice that microbes are biochemically simple, which is untrue, and dates back to the ideas of Louis Pasteur, who described fermentation as ‘life without oxygen’, implying simplicity. But Pasteur, as we have seen, admitted to being ‘completely in the dark’ about the function of fermentation, so he could hardly conclude that it was simple. Fermentation requires at least a dozen enzymes, and, as the first and so only means of providing energy, can be seen as irreducibly complex.


pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

Managers and entrepreneurs who follow these principles, who commit to rationality and to thinking for themselves, can expect to make the most of the cards they’re dealt and to delight their shareholders. Postlude: Old Dogs, Old Tricks If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . . —Rudyard Kipling, “If” As the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Louis Pasteur once observed, “Chance favors . . . the prepared mind,” and speaking of prepared minds, let’s conclude by looking at how the two remaining active outsider CEOs, Warren Buffett and John Malone, navigated the financial meltdown that followed the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. As you would expect, both pursued dramatically different courses from their peers’.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

And that day lasted for more than 2,000 years. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, this began to change. Three events stand out as catalysts. In Budapest, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis identified microbes on doctors’ dirty hands as the cause of a deadly form of childbirth fever. In Paris, a scientist named Louis Pasteur proved that germs existed, establishing a new idea called germ theory and discovering the actual microbes that Semmelweis theorized were the cause of illness. And in Glasgow, a doctor named Joseph Lister created the antiseptic method by applying the principles of germ theory to surgical care. Before Lister’s innovation, more than 80 percent of patients died from postsurgical infections.


pages: 740 words: 161,563

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

Brownian motion, deindustrialization, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Pasteur, New Economic Geography, Peace of Westphalia, price stability, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban sprawl

In most people’s minds, the man in black was supposed to be useful, like a doctor, a snake-catcher or a witch. He should be willing to write inaccurate letters of recommendation, to read the newspaper and to explain government decrees. He should also be able to pull strings in the spirit world, influence the weather and cure people and animals of rabies. (This partly explains the godlike status of Louis Pasteur, who developed a vaccine for rabies in 1885.) Naturally, this put the priest in a tricky position. If he refused to ring the bells to prevent a hailstorm, he was useless. If he rang the bells and it hailed anyway, he was inept. In 1874, the curé of the Limousin village of Burgnac refused to join a ‘pagan’ harvest procession.

Apart from the overgrown, collapsing terraces that were cut into the hillsides and the almost windowless tenements where the heated silkworms munched the leaves and made the sound of heavy rain, there is nothing in the verdant scenery on either side of the Rhône to show that life in the land of industrial vegetation was just as hard and unpredictable as it was in the foundries and coalfields. In 1852, a disease called pébrine began to spread among the silkworms. By the time Louis Pasteur discovered the cause and a cure in 1869, the industry had collapsed, the Suez Canal had opened and cheaper silk was being imported from the East. A worm had brought prosperity and a micro-organism took it away. At about the same time, the vines that smallholders had rushed to plant on their plots of rye and wheat were attacked by a peppery mildew called oidium.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

“You’re never completely at home, and that can drive you. It can challenge you not to seek being comfortable.” As with so many other observant and creative people, she found that a sense of detachment or slight alienation made her better at figuring out the forces at play. That helped her honor the maxim often preached by Louis Pasteur himself: Be prepared for the unexpected. Partly as a result, Charpentier became one of those scientists who could be both focused and distracted. Though impeccably groomed and casually elegant even when riding a bicycle, she also fit the stereotype of an absent-minded professor. When I traveled to see her in Berlin, where she moved after Umeå, she got to my hotel on her bike a few minutes late.

Supreme Court began the process of defining what was “obvious” and “non-obvious” in assessing whether an invention was “not before known.” Deciding on patents was particularly difficult when it involved biological processes. Nevertheless, biological patents have a long history. In 1873, for example, the French biologist Louis Pasteur was awarded the first known patent for a microorganism: a method for making “yeast free from organic germs of disease.” Thus we have pasteurized milk, juice, and wine. The modern biotechnology industry was born a century later, when a Stanford attorney approached Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer and convinced them to file for a patent on the method they had discovered for manufacturing new genes using recombinant DNA.


pages: 257 words: 66,480

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

Dealing with only one version, scientists suspect, is an advantage, if not a necessity, when building complex compounds like DNA and proteins. The same should hold true for life elsewhere. The question is how to espy this subtle characteristic from a distance. It’s fairly easy to detect chirality of purifed samples in the lab, as the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur did in 1848 for a compound derived from wine lees by measuring how the electric feld of light passing through the material is rotated clockwise or counterclockwise—a phenomenon known as circular polarization. Recently a team led by William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute managed to do the same with photosynthetic microbes.


pages: 206 words: 67,030

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris

colonial exploitation, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, stakhanovite, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

Unlike trichinosis, which seldom has fatal consequences and which does not even produce symptoms in the majority of infected individuals, anthrax often runs a rapid course that begins with body boils and terminates in death through blood poisoning. The great epidemics of anthrax that formerly swept across Europe and Asia were not brought under control until the development of the anthrax vaccine by Louis Pasteur in 1881. Jahweh’s failure to interdict contact with the domesticated vectors of anthrax is especially damaging to Maimonides’ explanation, since the relationship between this disease in animals and man was known during biblical times. As described in the Book of Exodus, one of the plagues sent against the Egyptians clearly relates the symptomology of animal anthrax to a human disease: … and it became a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and beast.


pages: 257 words: 13,443

Statistical Arbitrage: Algorithmic Trading Insights and Techniques by Andrew Pole

algorithmic trading, Benoit Mandelbrot, constrained optimization, Dava Sobel, deal flow, financial engineering, George Santayana, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market clearing, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, pattern recognition, price discrimination, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, transaction costs

Now, U0 = logX0 = 0, so that: µZ = √ √ 1 − (−1) = 2 e[1 − (−1)] e 1 − (0) From standard statistical tables (see references in Johnson, Kotz, and Balakrishnan), (−1) = 0.15865 so the mean of the median truncated lognormal distribution (with µY = 0, σ = 1) is 2.774. CHAPTER 8 Nobel Difficulties Chance favors the prepared mind. —Louis Pasteur 8.1 INTRODUCTION this chapter, we examine scenarios that create negative results for I nstatistical arbitrage plays. When operating an investment strategy, and notwithstanding risk filters and stop loss rules, surprises should be expected to occur with some frequency. The first demonstration examines a single pair that exhibits textbook reversionary behavior until a fundamental development, a takeover announcement, creates a breakpoint.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

These new lenses enabled the microbiological work of scientists such as Robert Koch, one of the first scientists to identify the cholera bacterium. (After receiving the Nobel Prize for his work in 1905, Koch wrote to Carl Zeiss, “A large part of my success I owe to your excellent microscopes.”) With his great rival Louis Pasteur, Koch and his microscopes helped develop and evangelize the germ theory of disease. From a technological standpoint, the great nineteenth-century breakthrough in public health—the knowledge that invisible germs can kill—was a kind of team effort between maps and microscopes. Today, Koch is rightly celebrated for the numerous microorganisms that he identified through those Zeiss lenses.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

He connected this with the fact that the physicians had often come straight from autopsies, and made them wash their hands with chlorinated lime water, which reduced maternal deaths by almost ninety per cent. New microscopes had made it possible to see microorganisms. Especially important was the achromatic microscope, invented by Joseph Jackson Lister. The French chemist Louis Pasteur showed that microorganisms could spoil milk and wine, and invented a technique to prevent bacterial contamination – pasteurization. He also developed vaccines for rabies and anthrax. As knowledge about microorganisms began to take hold, it gave an extra urgency to attempts to improve sanitation and water supplies and vaccination became routine.


pages: 208 words: 67,582

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

He became depressed and was committed to an asylum, where he died at a relatively young age. The reason his approach did not catch on was simply because it conflicted with the prevailing paradigm that diseases were spread through ‘bad air’ or miasmas. It would take another half-century before the work of the French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur gave rise to another paradigm, in which viruses and bacteria emerged as pathogens. The current dominant paradigm in psychiatry is the illness model. This also ties in seamlessly with the reduction of science to scientism: all results must be generalisable, based on objective and value-free research using accepted methods, independent of context.


Jaws by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, clean water, desegregation, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, out of africa, randomized controlled trial, twin studies, Wall-E, women in the workforce

Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who showed in the 1840s that the dangerous fever, which killed about 10 percent (in some cases, up to 30 percent) of women in maternity wards, could be nearly eliminated by careful hand washing by physicians. Doctors largely refused to believe his empirical evidence because it conflicted with then-current theories of contagion, which did not yet include Louis Pasteur’s germ theory. They recognized that diseases could be transferred from person to person, as Edward Jenner had shown by spreading cowpox from individual to individual to “vaccinate” them against smallpox. But they had no idea what the causative agent was, and many still believed that small animals like flies could be spontaneously generated from nonliving things like garbage.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Although this book is about the United States, many of the inventions were made by foreigners in their own lands or by foreigners who had recently transplanted to America. Among the many foreigners who deserve credit for key elements of the Great Inventions are transplanted Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Frenchmen Louis Pasteur for the germ theory of disease and Louis Lumière for the motion picture, Englishmen Joseph Lister for antiseptic surgery and David Hughes for early wireless experiments, and Germans Karl Benz for the internal combustion engine and Heinrich Hertz for key inventions that made possible the 1896 wireless patents of the recent Italian immigrant Guglielmo Marconi.

This chapter pulls together the many explanations. These include the development of urban sanitation infrastructure, including running water and separate sewer pipes, that were part of the “networking” of the American home that took place between 1870 and 1929 (as discussed in chapter 4). A contribution was made by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which fostered public awareness about the dangers inherent in swarming insects and pools of stagnant water. The internal combustion engine deserves its share of credit for removing the urban horse and its prodigious and unrestrained outpouring of manure and urine onto city streets.

The elements of surgery and the use of ether as an anesthetic were developed before the Civil War, and research on the use of anesthesia, including ether, chloroform, and even cocaine, continued after the Civil War. In the late nineteenth century, techniques were developed to use anesthesia in surgery, to remove gallstones, and to treat appendicitis, heart murmurs, and liver disease. Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch have been described as “the remarkable trio who transformed modern medicine.”89 Although individuals such as Pasteur and Koch often get credit for individual cures, progress was a team effort as scientists from the United States and several European countries replicated and improved on the early experiments.


pages: 261 words: 71,798

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People by Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

Bernie Madoff, business climate, call centre, Columbine, delayed gratification, impulse control, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh

The list below is not all-inclusive, and there are many books out there that go into greater detail about dealing with toxic or dangerous personalities. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll find some guidance here and that these tactics will help you as they have helped others in similar situations to stay safe. Gain Knowledge Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and microbiologist who among other things gave us pasteurization, said with some authority, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” He was right. By now, you’ve read the previous chapters and are familiar with the four dangerous personalities and the accompanying checklists. (And many times I've heard people say, “Wow, I know someone exactly like that!”)


pages: 285 words: 78,180

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

This stood in marked contrast to the notion of “spontaneous generation,” which dates back to the Romans and, as the name suggests, posits that life can arise spontaneously from non-living matter, such as maggots from rotting meat or fruit flies from bananas. In his famous 1859 experiments Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) disproved spontaneous generation by means of a simple experiment. He boiled broth in two different flasks, one with no cover and open to the air, one with an S-curved top containing a cotton plug. After the flask open to the air cooled, bacteria grew in it, but none grew in the second flask.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Considering oneself to be lucky, in other words, correlates with optimism, risk-taking, confidence, an action-orientation, and many of the other characteristics of the wealthy we have already described. Unlucky people, in contrast, have been shown to be more tense and anxious, creating a broader sense of passivity and risk-aversion, lessening their opportunities to expose themselves to new situations that might give rise to positive interactions or outcomes. As it turns out, Louis Pasteur was right when he said, ‘‘Chance favors only the mind that is prepared,’’ as was F. L. Emerson when he said, ‘‘I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.’’ The wealthy are luckier, but for the most part, they have created their own luck and they work to increase the number of opportunities they have to benefit from good luck.


A Natural History of Beer by Rob DeSalle

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, NP-complete, phenotype, placebo effect, wikimedia commons

People had long been aware that some specific element promoted fermentation, and selection for the agent concerned was implemented by transferring the floating froth that formed atop one brew to the next. But the discovery that fermentation was accomplished by the tiny living organisms we know today as yeasts had to await the research of the French chemist Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century. Once Pasteur had made his great discovery, however, it was only a matter of time before it was realized that the brewers of what had become known as lager were making their beer with a distinctive kind of yeast (see Chapter 8). Unlike the traditional Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which was happiest fermenting at around 21˚C, the newly recognized yeast now known as Saccharomyces pastorianus (for Pasteur) flourished at much cooler temperatures of around 4.5˚C; and unlike the top-fermenting Saccharomyces cerevisiae, it descended to the bottom of the fermenting tank, taking other detritus with it and leaving the liquid above clean and bright—albeit in earlier days typically quite dark in color, because that was the result when malt was roasted in a smoky, wood-fired kiln.


pages: 314 words: 75,678

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

There’s a practical distinction between blue-sky research into novel scientific concepts (also called basic research) and efforts to take scientific discoveries and make them useful (what’s known as applied or translational research). Although they’re different things, it’s a mistake to think—as some purists do—that basic science shouldn’t be tainted by considering how it might lead to a useful commercial product. Some of the best inventions have emerged when scientists start their research with an end use in mind; Louis Pasteur’s work on microbiology, for example, led to vaccines and pasteurization. We need more government programs that integrate basic and applied research in the areas where we most need breakthroughs. The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative is a good example of how this can work.


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

While the debate raged between gourmands and decadents as to the true purpose of wine, the single most important breakthrough in humanunderstanding of alcoholic drinks—a complete and accurate scientific explanation of why they are alcoholic—was achieved in France. The genius responsible for the advance was Louis Pasteur. Prior to his definitive studies, no one in history had been able to describe precisely how grape juice turned into wine. For all they knew, it might have been the invisible hand of Bacchus or some other form of divine intervention. Pasteur made his breakthrough by building on the work of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, who had discovered that the process of fermentation consisted of the conversion of carbohydrates to carbon dioxide and ethanol, which he named alcohol, thereby introducing the Arabic name for the substance to the West.

The federal regulator, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), did not allow alcohol manufacturers to make “therapeutic or curative claims” about their products. Past attempts by people in the wine trade to add positive statements to their labels had been rejected, notably in the case of Kermit Lynch, an importer, who had sought and been refused permission to quote Thomas Jefferson (“Wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health”), Louis Pasteur (“Wine is the healthiest, most hygienic beverage known to man”), and 1 Timothy (“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake”) on his merchandise.73 Initial attempts to incorporate quotations from or references to 60 Minutes into publicity material were rebuffed by the BATF.


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Almost a century later, the physician John Snow used statistical charts as well as maps to demonstrate which water sources (notably, the infamous Broad Street pump) were infecting the most people during London’s cholera outbreak of 1854. Snow, like Bernoulli, lacked the advantage of knowing what sort of substance or creature (in this case it was Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium) caused the disease he was trying to comprehend and control. His results were remarkable anyway. Then, in 1906, after Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and Joseph Lister and others had persuasively established the involvement of microbes in infectious disease, an English doctor named W. H. Hamer made some interesting points about “smouldering” epidemics in a series of lectures to the Royal College of Physicians in London. Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval of time.

The virulence of a given virus within a given host tells you something about the evolutionary history between the two. Just what does it tell you? That’s the tricky part. Most of us have heard an old chestnut on the subject of virulence: The first rule of a successful parasite is Don’t kill your host. One medical historian has traced this idea back to Louis Pasteur, noting that the most “efficient” parasite, in Pasteur’s view, was one that “lives in harmony with its host,” and therefore latent infections should be considered “the ideal form of parasitism.” Hans Zinsser voiced the same notion in Rats, Lice and History, observing that a long period of association between one species of parasite and one species of host tends to lead, by evolutionary adaptation, to “a more perfect mutual tolerance between invader and invaded.”


pages: 282 words: 82,107

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, carbon footprint, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

“First, enclose the substances you wish to preserve in bottles or jars; second, close the openings of your vessels with the greatest care, for success depends principally on the seal; third, submit the substances, thus enclosed, to the action of boiling water in a bain-marie . . . fourth, remove the bottles from the bain-marie at the appropriate time.” He listed the times necessary to boil different foods, typically several hours. Appert was not familiar with the earlier work of Boyle, Papin, and others; he had devised his method solely by experiment and had no idea why it worked. It was not until the 1860s that Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, finally determined that decomposition was caused by microbes that could be killed by applying heat. That is why Papin’s technique, which involved heating, had worked; but most of the time he had not heated his food samples enough to kill off the microbes. Appert’s long process of trial and error had revealed that heat had to be applied for several hours in most cases, and that some foods needed to be heated for longer than others.


pages: 302 words: 83,116

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

In retrospect, it’s safe to say that Ignatz Semmelweis was going mad. At the age of forty-seven, he was tricked into entering a sanitarium. He tried to escape, was forcibly restrained, and died within two weeks, his reputation shattered. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. Semmelweis was posthumously vindicated by Louis Pasteur’s research in germ theory, after which it became standard practice for doctors to scrupulously clean their hands before treating patients. So do contemporary doctors follow Semmelweis’s orders? A raft of recent studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should.


pages: 349 words: 86,224

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Once stationary, the domus, with its humans, livestock, grain, feces, and plant wastes, makes an attractive feedlot for many commensals, from rats and swallows down the chain of predation to fleas and lice, bacteria and protozoa. The pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing. In fact, it was not until the late nineteenth-century discoveries of the founders of microbiology, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, that it became clear what a heavy price in chronic and lethal infections Homo sapiens was paying for the absence of clean water, sanitation, and sewage removal. As devastating new illnesses left humans not knowing what hit them, folk theories and remedies proliferated. Only one nostrum—“dispersal”—implicitly identified crowding as the basic cause.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The only fear Irv admits to is spiders. Irv’s father went into the family business. The hardware stores were called Weissman and Sons, but they have since closed down because, well, the sons had other ideas. When Irv was ten years old, he read Paul de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters about the trailblazing work of Louis Pasteur and Paul Ehrlich and other early bacteriologists. For an entire generation of scientists this book proved seminal. Irv was no different. Inspired by Microbe Hunters and still in high school, Weissman got a job at a local lab doing transplantation research. He published two papers, both on cancer and transplantation, before turning eighteen.


pages: 262 words: 80,257

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

However, bathing isn’t the only way to disengage from the outer world. The acclaimed writer Jonathan Franzen used more extreme measures while working on his novel The Corrections. To coax his imagination, he would often type in the dark while wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold. Whatever works. INSIGHT AND OUTSIGHT * * * Louis Pasteur, the great pioneer of biomedical research, once said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” This statement is a bit ambiguous even in its original context. We interpret “prepared mind” to mean a specific brain state that inclines one to solve problems by insight. Clearly, the existence of such a brain state would be an important discovery, not only because it would yield evidence about the origins of insight, but also because it would suggest ways to spark aha moments.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

First, the project must further the quest for fundamental scientific under­standing, and second, it must have a practical use. DARPA favors projects that meet both of these criteria, allowing them to avoid highly theoretical projects with few practical applications, and projects that may have practical applications but offer few scientific benefits. The model for DARPA’s rules is Louis Pasteur, who advanced basic science while tackling real-world problems, like preservation of food and the prevention of tuberculosis. Boundary rules are also used to diagnose a wide range of medical conditions, from HIV and celiac disease to dangerous infections in infants, among others. Boundary rules can help medical staff make rapid decisions when delay can result in death.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

“People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role.” Ulam believed the same could be said of scientific research. Some scientists ran into seemingly good fortune so often that it was impossible not to suspect that there was an element of talent involved. Chemist Louis Pasteur put forward a similar philosophy in the nineteenth century. “Chance favours the prepared mind” was how he put it. Luck is rarely embedded so deeply in a situation that it can’t be altered. It might not be possible to completely remove luck, but history has shown that it can often be replaced by skill to some extent.


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But before his work could have much benefit he had to persuade people – principally his medical colleagues – to change their behaviour. His real battle was not his initial discovery but what followed from it. His views were ridiculed and he was driven eventually to insanity and suicide. Much of the medical profession did not take his work seriously until Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister had developed the germ theory of disease, which explained why hygiene was important. We live in a pessimistic period. As well as being worried by the likely consequences of global warming, it is easy to feel that many societies are, despite their material success, increasingly burdened by their social failings.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

I still found it hard to digest the knowledge that while Victoria’s mind slowly deconstructs, it was quietly being reconstructed under the nose of Wray and other scientists, creating a portal to somewhere no brain scan can go. It’s hard to say when expectation will meet reality for iPS cells. There is a huge element of luck in biological research. Take Louis Pasteur, the French pioneer of vaccination. His discovery of the chicken cholera vaccine only occurred when he abandoned the experiment out of frustration and took a vacation, returning to discover that leaving the broth was precisely what was necessary to ‘attenuate’, or weaken, the bacteria enough for it to become a vaccine.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Hence even if we think slow and hard, conclusively finding causal relationships is difficult. Because our minds are used to an information-poor world, we are tempted to reason with limited data, even though too often, too many factors are at play to simply reduce an effect to a particular cause. Take the case of the vaccine against rabies. On July 6, 1885, the French chemist Louis Pasteur was introduced to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been mauled by a rabid dog. Pasteur had invented vaccination and had worked on an experimental vaccine against rabies. Meister’s parents begged Pasteur to use the vaccine to treat their son. He did, and Joseph Meister survived. In the press, Pasteur was celebrated as having saved the young boy from a certain, painful death.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

He wrote that the discoveries of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas and to Asia were the most important events of human history, because they linked all parts of the world in a web of transport and commerce, with vast potential benefits. Smith also wrote, with dismay, that the new sea routes occasioned a massive repression of native societies by European conquerors and colonizers. Because Smith lived a century before Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Giovanni Grassi, Ronald Ross, Martinus Beijerinck, and others who elaborated the bacterial and viral transmission of disease, he did not realize the key role that Old World pathogens played in devastating the Native American societies. Columbus brought to the Americas not only conquerors but also a massive biological exchange.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Behind these figures lay an improvement in the average person’s quality of life of such a magnitude that those of us today who have never lived without running water, electricity or an indoor toilet may scarcely comprehend. Health is self-evidently one of the most important factors in the quality of life, and there too the world experienced a massive leap forward. Long before the advent of modern medicine in the latter half of the twentieth century, the contribution of the French scientist Louis Pasteur to the recognition of the germ theory of disease and the subsequent installation of sewerage and water networks in major towns at the turn of the twentieth century led to a sharp decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. Moreover, the introduction and diffusion over the next few decades of vaccinations against diseases, including smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough, generated a further drop in death rates.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Newton discovers the laws of motion and universal gravitation and invents calculus, laying the foundation for classical mechanics, which among other achievements got us from the Earth to the Moon. Thomas Newcomen discovers how to make the first practical steam engine and launches the machine age. Henry Ford discovers how to dramatically lower costs through mass production and puts millions of Americans behind the wheel of a car. Louis Pasteur discovers the principles of vaccination and saves untold millions of lives. Norman Borlaug discovers ways to make major improvements in agriculture, saving over a billion people from starvation. The source of human progress is human ability, which means intellectual ability. The greatest contributors to production are not those who supply physical labor but those who contribute ideas—new theories, inventions, tools, businesses, and methods—to the productive process.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And over the next half century, what Jenner termed “vaccination” (from the Latin root, vaccinia, used to denote cowpox) replaced variolation as the common prophylactic against the speckled monster. For several decades, the story ended there.2 But then, by happenstance, in the spring of 1879 a French scientist named Louis Pasteur was experimenting with chicken cholera. Having prepared several cholera cultures for injection into a batch of fowl, he turned to a separate research project—a distraction that lasted the entire summer. The following fall, when he injected a series of chickens with the months-old cholera cultures, something odd happened: rather than die, as most fowl did when exposed to the disease, these chickens fell ill and then recovered.


Protein Power: The High-Protein/Low-Carbohydrate Way to Lose Weight, Feel Fit, and Boost Your Health--In Just Weeks! by Michael R. Eades, Mary Dan Eades

agricultural Revolution, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA

Science progresses because people continue to question why. Researchers propose hypotheses based on their understanding of the natural world and then test them—and most of the time these theories blow up in their faces. The lucky ones stumble onto the hypotheses that turn out to be valid. But of course there’s more than luck involved, because as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and in our case our minds were prepared by many years of clinical practice with patients suffering all the illnesses that are heir to disordered insulin metabolism as well as by our unique combination of medical interests. Mike is a collector of diet books and old medical texts and has a strong interest in paleopathology and biochemistry; Mary Dan is interested in anthropology and has published a book on eating disorders and the deranged metabolic status of eating-disordered patients.


pages: 218 words: 83,794

Frommer's Portable California Wine Country by Erika Lenkert

gentrification, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, place-making, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

The wines of the Greeks and Romans were probably as good, or as bad, as those made by monks in the Middle Ages and only a bit improved by secular winemakers from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. WINEMAKING 101 21 The science called oenology, which has given the world the highest overall quality of wine ever, was developed after Louis Pasteur’s work with fermentation and bacteriology around 150 years ago. Only in the past few generations have winemakers acquired very technical training and earned PhDs in viticulture (the science of grape growing) in a concentrated effort to understand wine and vineyards. Even with this recent development of science applied to wine, the catchphrase today for many winemakers in Sonoma and Napa is, “I want the wine to make itself.”


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

This scourge plagued humanity for ten thousand years. In the twentieth century alone, it killed 400 million people, more people than have died in all wars in all of history. Just think about that. And we eliminated it! Edward Jenner made a vaccination for it in the 1790s. This is astonishing because this was before Louis Pasteur was even born, and he is the person who developed germ theory. So we learned to vaccinate against smallpox before we knew it was caused by germs, with technology little better than stone knives and bear skins. But think about what we can do with our technology today. We can deconstruct our pathological foes down to their essence, and in the future we will model them in computers and try ten thousand treatments in a moment’s time.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

page 33 “burst forth… with extraordinary malignity” London Times, September 12, 1849, p. 2. page 34 The epidemic of 1848–1849 Koch, p. 42. pages 34–35 “While the mechanism of life” London Times, September 13, 1849, p. 6. page 35 “countenance quite shrunk” Shephard, p. 158. page 36 With the exception of a few unusual compounds “Louis Pasteur, who proved the microbial origin of such devastating diseases as foot and mouth disease, plague, and wine rot, set the tone of the relationship from the start. The context of the encounter between intellect and bacteria defined medicine as a battleground: bacteria were seen as ‘germs’ to be destroyed.


The Fractalist by Benoit Mandelbrot

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, double helix, financial engineering, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Olbers’ paradox, Paul Lévy, power law, Richard Feynman, statistical model, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto

(Illustration Credit 23.1) Helping Lady Luck Through Telephones Do you recall that my testing of cotton prices began with a mysterious diagram on a blackboard? Well, Lady Luck struck again when I was asked to help with some troublesome noise on data transmittal telephones, and I found a way I liked of thriving as a jack-of-all-trades. An odd thing is that chance has helped me on many occasions. Louis Pasteur is credited with the observation that chance favors the prepared mind. I think that my long string of lucky breaks can be credited to my always paying attention. I look at funny things and never hesitate to ask questions. Most people would not have noticed the dirty blackboard or looked at the article that Szolem pulled from his wastebasket for me to read.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

It was stopped only when the physician John Snow plotted all London cholera cases on a map; they were tightly clustered around the public water pump on Broad Street, the water of which had become contaminated. Snow persuaded the authorities to close this pump, stopping the outbreak. Citywide plumbing that brought clean water and took away sewage, combined with Louis Pasteur’s convincing demonstrations that germs caused diseases such as cholera, ensured that this was London’s last brush with King Cholera. Cholera outbreaks hint at an important fact: something like an Engels Pause occurred in aspects of health at the start of the Industrial Era. Improvements were not immediate.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

So when Magdalena took a seat at her first meeting of the general partners, the assistants silently cheered. Her win was their win. THERESIA Shortly after Theresia made partner at Accel, the firm hosted its quarterly off-site “team building” event. Accel co-founder Arthur Patterson had adopted the Louis Pasteur quote “Chance favors the prepared mind”; he liked to gather the team to talk trends coming down the pipeline. Partners from Accel’s other offices flew in for the off-site, held in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco. Patterson told one and all, “The more you engage socially together, the more it helps you work together in business.


The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky

clean water, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

C h o l e ra i s a d i s e a s e caused by bacteria, Vibrio cholerae. Although bacteria, the oldest form of life on earth, was first discovered in the seventeenth century, it was not until the late nineteenth century that its role in diseases was understood. Only a few years after the oyster panic, the French chemist Louis Pasteur promoted his theory that diseases were caused by germs. But it was only a theory—referred to as “the germ theory”—until the German bacteriologist Robert Koch started proving the connection. In 1884, after documenting the infection process of numerous other diseases, he demonstrated how Vibrio cholerae caused cholera.


pages: 306 words: 88,545

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex by Rachel Feltman

COVID-19, disintermediation, double helix, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Internet Archive, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, moral panic, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, TikTok, University of East Anglia, white flight

But we have a secret weapon that koalas don’t: condoms. If you won’t suit up for yourself and your partner, do it for the li’l guys in Australia who wish they could. Long before humans knew that contact with microbes could cause disease (this, my friends, is called germ theory, and we have a man named Louis Pasteur and some dirty, kinky flasks to thank for it), we knew that having sex could make us sick. Or at least… we sort of did. Sometimes. The history of medicine is riddled with descriptions of strange leprosies that focused on the genitals, cruel skin afflictions most assuredly caused by poor hygiene, and oozy rashes sent down from heaven or up from hell, depending on the religious dogma of the time.


pages: 286 words: 92,521

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

THE HISTORY OF Medicine has been marked by some turning points so dramatic it is difficult to imagine how Medicine was practiced before they occurred. Before “germ theory” was developed, for example, there was no consistent, verifiable explanation for how infectious diseases occurred or why certain treatments (like dousing a fresh wound with alcohol) seemed to be effective. After Louis Pasteur fully fleshed out the relationship between microscopic organisms and disease in humans, the world was forever changed. Infectious disease—far and away the number one killer of human beings for the vast majority of human history—is now responsible for just a small fraction of global deaths. Tuberculosis, the number one infectious killer of humans in the world prior to COVID-19, led to 1.4 million worldwide deaths in 2019.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

To see a virus, scientists needed powerful, expensive electron microscopes, but since the days of Dutch lens hobbyist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who in 1674 invented a microscope, it has been possible for people to see what he called “wee animalcules” with little more than a well-crafted glass lens and candlelight. The relationship between those “animalcules” and disease was first figured out by France’s Louis Pasteur in 1864, and during the following hundred years bacteriologists learned so much about the organisms that young scientists in 1964 considered classic bacteriology a dead field. In 1928 British scientist Alexander Fleming had discovered that Penicillium mold could kill Staphylococcus bacteria in petri dishes, and dubbed the lethal antibacterial chemical secreted by the mold “penicillin.”13 In 1944 penicillin was introduced to general clinical practice, causing a worldwide sensation that would be impossible to overstate.

As a medical community, there is no cause to feel humiliated by the Legionnaires’ affair, but it is altogether proper that we be humbled.”65 Chagrined by events of 1976, the U.S. public health community looked to the future, for the first time in the late twentieth century, with a vague sense of unease. 7 N’zara LASSA, EBOLA, AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POLICIES Improvement in health is likely to come, in the future as in the past, from modification of the conditions which lead to disease, rather than from intervention into the mechanisms of disease after it has occurred. —Thomas McKeown, 1976 The microbe is nothing; the terrain everything. —Louis Pasteur While his colleagues in Atlanta anguished over Swine Flu damage control, Joe McCormick was content to finally have a chance to uncrate several thousand pounds of laboratory equipment and build his remote Lassa Fever Research Unit in Sierra Leone. It hadn’t been easy getting all the gear by ship from Atlanta to Freetown and by assorted trucks along the sporadically paved roads to Segbwema.

Pakistan; antibiotic resistance in Palese, Peter Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Pan American Sanitary Conference Panama; malaria in; yellow fever in Pangu Kaza Asila Panos Institute Papua New Guinea; Institute of Medical Research; malaria in paramyxovirus simian virus parasites; drugs for; see also specific diseases parasitology Parke-Davis Parmenter, Robert Parodi, A. S. Pasteur, Louis Pasteur Institute Pattyn, Stefan Paul Ehrlich Institute Peace Corps pediculosis Peloponnesian War pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) penicillin; resistance to Penicillinase–Producing Neisseria gonorrhoeae (PPNG) Pennsylvania Department of Health pentamidine Peromyscus; P. leucopus; P. manicu-Latus Persian Gulf war pertussis Peru: AIDS in; cholera in; cocaine production in; deforestation in Peter, Georges Peters, C.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

In the 1840s, when Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that having medical students wash their hands dramatically reduced death rates during childbirth, he was scorned by his colleagues and ended up in an asylum. It would be two decades before his ideas gained scientific legitimacy as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch laid the foundations of germ theory. As physicist Max Planck once observed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” I don’t mean to imply that it’s never wise to be first.


pages: 297 words: 98,506

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

business climate, butterfly effect, complexity theory, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, impulse control, Lao Tzu, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, power law, systems thinking

Eventually, she came to a hut along the banks of the river she’d been following. She staggered and collapsed inside. There is always a lot of chance involved in a survival situation, both good luck and bad. It was Juliane’s good fortune that three hunters turned up the next day and delivered her to a local doctor. But, as Louis Pasteur said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” Tough and clearheaded, this teenage girl, who had lost her shoes (not to mention her mother) on the first day, saved herself; the other survivors took the same eleven days to sit down and die. The forces that put them there were beyond their control. But the course of events for those who found themselves alive on the ground were the result of deep and personal individual reactions to a new environment.


pages: 330 words: 99,226

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

Advocates of the doctrine of spontaneous generation pointed out that heat might kill some “vital principle” essential to the production of life out of inanimate matter. Heating broth and sealing it away would in that case fail to produce life. Exposing heated broth to air that had likewise been heated was no better. In 1864, however, the French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) produced the clincher. He boiled a meat broth until it was sterile, and did so in a flask with a long, thin neck that bent down, then up again, like a horizontal 5. Then he neither sealed it off nor stoppered it. He left the broth exposed to cool air. The cool air could penetrate freely into the vessel and bathe the broth.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

As Brian Eno says, the friend of creative work is alertness, and nothing focuses your attention like stepping onto unfamiliar ground. Eiduson’s research project isn’t the only one to reach this conclusion. Her colleagues looked at historical examples of long-term scientific achievers, such as Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, and compared them to “one-hit wonders” such as James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, and Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. They found the same pattern: Fleming and Pasteur switched research topics frequently; Watson and Salk did not. This sort of project switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences.


pages: 301 words: 100,599

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, white picket fence

He kept his African gear hidden away at the Institute, piled in olive-drab military trunks in storage rooms and in tractor trailers parked behind buildings and padlocked, because he did not want anyone else to touch his gear or use it or take it away from him. He wanted to be ready to use it at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola ever came to the surface again. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies. 1989 SUMMER The Army had always had a hard time figuring out what to do with Nancy and Jerry Jaax. They were married officers at the same rank in a small corps, the Veterinary Corps. What if one of them (the wife) is trained in the use of space suits?


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

This protected them from the elements and flooded their houses with light, initiating a great leap forward in hygiene. Dirt and vermin became visible, and living spaces clean and disease free. As a result, plague was eliminated from most of Europe by the early eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, transparent, easily sterilised swan-necked glass flasks allowed the French chemist Louis Pasteur to disprove the theory that germs spontaneously generated from putrefying matter. This led to a revolution in the understanding of disease and to the development of modern medicine. Not long afterwards, glass light bulbs changed both work and leisure forever. Meanwhile, new trade links between East and West in the nineteeth century meant that a technologically backward China soon caught up.


pages: 307 words: 96,974

Rats by Robert Sullivan

gentrification, Louis Pasteur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, trade route, urban renewal, yellow journalism

Fear kept them from utilizing that knowledge—fear on the part of the city's business interests, fear that in turn inspired fear in the poorest parts of the city, which were most susceptible to disease and its ramifications. The plague that arrived in San Francisco was part of the third plague pandemic that had broken out in China in 1850. Alexandre Yersin, a French microbiologist, identified the plague bacillus that was eventually named for him, Yersinia pestis, in 1894. Yersin worked with Louis Pasteur at Pasteur's institute in Paris. Yersin had met Pasteur after Yersin had cut his finger while operating on a man who had been bitten by a wild dog; his finger still bleeding, Yersin ran immediately to Pasteur's laboratory, where he was vaccinated with Pasteur's new rabies vaccine. When a plague epidemic erupted in Hong Kong, Pasteur sent Yersin to investigate.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

A third quadrant, to which Stokes gives no name, is for research that does not seek to advance either basic or applied science; examples would be nineteenth-century classification projects in natural history. The fourth quadrant, named for 120 Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia the great French chemist and life scientist Louis Pasteur, is for Stokes the most important. For this quadrant encompasses research that, like Pasteur’s, is both basic and applied. It advances fundamental understandings while solving significant practical problems. Pasteur’s research “was motivated by the very practical objectives of improving industrial processes and public health.


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

The difference between the living and the non-living, between the animate and the inanimate, appeared so fundamental that it was considered implausible that it could ever be bridged by mechanistic explanations of any sort. This philosophy of vitalism reached a peak in the nineteenth century. It was supported by leading biologists like Johannes Müller and Louis Pasteur, and it persisted well into the twentieth century. Vitalists thought that the property of being alive could only be explained by appealing to some special sauce: a spark of life, an elán vital. But as we now know, no special sauce is needed. Vitalism today is thoroughly rejected in scientific circles.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

Congress responded with a bill to fund infectious disease research under the direction of the newly formed National Board of Health. This investment—most of it funding a small navy research complex on Staten Island—made the United States a laggard by European standards. Beginning in the early 1870s, Germany and France had underwritten the early development of bacteriology in the laboratories of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. Once again it was war that pushed the government into new territory. During the 1898 conflict with Spain, U.S. troops faced a devil’s division of cholera and malaria ten times deadlier than the antiquated arms of Spanish soldiers. A jolted Congress acted fast to expand the budget and purview of the Marine Hospital Service to investigate infectious diseases and other “matters pertaining to public health.”


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Although his urban dream was never fully realised, Ledoux’s semicircular saltworks is now listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Regular trains link Besançon and Arc-et-Senans (€7, 30 minutes, 10 daily). ROUTE PASTEUR Almost every single town in France has at least one street, square or garden named after Louis Pasteur, the great 19th-century chemist who invented pasteurisation and developed the first rabies vaccine. In the Jura it is even more the case, since the illustrious man was a local lad. Pasteur was born in 1822 in the well-preserved medieval town of Dole , former capital of Franche-Comté, 20km west of Arc-et-Senans along the D472.

A scenic stroll along the Canal des Tanneurs in the historic tanner’s quarter brings you to his childhood home, La Maison Natale de Pasteur (www.musee-pasteur.com; 43 rue Pasteur, Dole; adult/child €5/free; 10am-noon & 2-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun) , now an atmospheric museum housing exhibits that include his cot, first drawings and university cap and gown. In 1827 the Pasteur family settled in the bucolic village of Arbois (population 3653), 35km southeast of Dole. His laboratory and workshops here are on display at La Maison de Louis Pasteur (83 rue de Courcelles, Arbois; adult/child €6/3; guided tours 9.45-11.45am & 2-6pm, closed mid Oct–Mar) . The house is still decorated with its original 19th-century fixtures and fittings. ARBOIS & THE ROUTE DES VINS DE JURA Corkscrewing through some 80km of well-tended vines, pretty countryside and stone villages is the Route des Vins de Jura (Jura Wine Road; www.laroutedesvinsdujura.com) .

Construction began in the 13th century, and was completed in 1451; the mismatched materials resemble Lego blocks. Above the north aisle are three lovely stained-glass windows; the oldest, in the Chapelle Saint Jérôme, dates from 1531. The entrance to the stately 13th-century cloister Offline map Google map is on place Louis Pasteur. Ramparts CITY WALL Offline map Google map Bayonne’s 17th-century fortifications are now covered with grass, dotted with trees and enveloped in pretty parks. You can walk the stretches of the old ramparts that rise above bd Rempart Lachepaillet and rue Tour de Sault. Tours The tourist office organises a range of city tours ( adult €6-10; some in English), from a historical tour of old Bayonne to a chocolate-fiend or museum tour.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We’ve known about bacteria for 350 years, ever since a seventeenth-century Dutch scientist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, slipped some of his saliva under a homemade microscope, which he had crafted with lenses made from whiskers of glass, and espied single-celled organisms crawling, sprawling, flailing about in the suburbs of our gums. He named them animalcules and peered at them through a vast array of lenses (an avid microscoper, he made over five hundred). In the nineteenth century Louis Pasteur proposed that healthy microbes might be vital, and their absence spur illness. By the time tiny viruses were discovered, only a hundred years ago, people were already driving cars and flying airplanes. But we didn’t have the tools to study the every-colored, shifting, scented shoal of microbes we swim in, play in, breathe in all the day long.


pages: 363 words: 108,670

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25. 1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer. 1644 Pope Urban VIII dies. 1648 Thirty Years’ War ends. 1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15. 1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out. 1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock. 1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14. 1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars. 1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies. 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III. 1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings. 1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia. 1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor. 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes. 1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time. 1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight. 1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy. 1758 “Halley’s comet” returns. 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere. 1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies. 1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus. 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris. 1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion. 1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books. 1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni. 1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy. 1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum. 1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies. 1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease. 1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars. 1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro. 1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death. 1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science. 1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it. 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit. 1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots. 1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations. 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe. 1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI. 1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo. 1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina. 1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit. 1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council. 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. 1971 Apollo 15 commander David R.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

So you see that criticizing NLP is like criticizing a hammer.” I tell him I’ve read terrible things about NLP on the Internet—how some scientists call it nonsense—and he says, “I know it’s not scientific. Some of the techniques will not always work in the same way in a laboratory every time!” He laughs. “But Louis Pasteur was accused of being in league with the Devil. The Wright brothers were called fraudsters. . . .” • • • MONDAY. I spot Richard Bandler by the stage, surrounded by fans. “Wow,” he says as a woman hands him a rare copy of his book Trance-formations. “That goes for, like, six hundred dollars on eBay.”


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

He was pretty sure that this was because the medical students were carrying something nasty from the corpses in the dissection room, so he instituted proper handwashing practices with chlorinated lime, and did some figures on the benefits. The death rates fell, but in an era of medicine that championed ‘theory’ over real-world empirical evidence, he was basically ignored, until Louis Pasteur came along and confirmed the germ theory. Semmelweis died alone in an asylum. You’ve heard of Pasteur. Even when Edward Jenner introduced the much safer vaccination for protecting people against smallpox at the turn of the nineteenth century, he was strongly opposed by the London cognoscenti.


pages: 401 words: 108,855

Cultureshock Paris by Cultureshock Staff

Anton Chekhov, clean water, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, money market fund, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, Skype, telemarketer, urban renewal, young professional

He instituted social, legal and administrative reforms, but disastrous military campaigns forced him into exile. After a triumphant return of 100 days, he was defeated by Wellington at Waterloo, and died eventually on the remote island of Saint-Helena. Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) A writer popular worldwide, Dumas’ most famous novels are The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) Father of modern medicine whose discoveries are credited with lengthening the human lifespan. Developed a method to eliminate contaminated milk (pasteurisation) and immunisations to combat disease. Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) Elevated French cooking to an art, creating what is known as haute cuisine.


pages: 357 words: 110,072

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh

animal electricity, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, false memory syndrome, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, germ theory of disease, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microdosing, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, sugar pill, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

Each black oblong represents one death, and the Broad Street pump can be seen at the centre of the epidemic. Other major scientific breakthroughs included vaccination, which had been growing in popularity since the start of the 1800s, and Joseph Lister’s pioneering use of antiseptics in 1865. Thereafter Louis Pasteur invented vaccines for rabies and anthrax, thus contributing to the development of the germ theory of disease. Even more importantly, Robert Koch and his pupils identified the bacteria responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, leprosy, bubonic plague, tetanus and syphilis.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Alexandra Hicks, food writer and avid gardener, explains garlic's magic:“Simply stated, when a clove of garlic is cut or crushed, its extracellular membrane separates into sections.This enables an enzyme called allinase to come in contact and combine with the precursor or substrate alliin to form allicin, which contains the odoriferous constituent of garlic.” Renowned for his revelation that microscopic germs caused infection, French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur was first to recognize garlic's antibacterial properties.To demonstrate garlic's amazing strength, imagine that one milliliter of raw garlic juice can be compared to a milligram of streptomycin or sixty micrograms of penicillin. 216 chapter 8 : The Good Life Interview Jason and the Laundronauts by Jason Wentworth QUESTION: What work do you do?


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

But more than any other actor, Lessig’s individual role in translating the meanings of F/OSS deserves attention. He acted as a “spokesperson” for many years—a role conceptualized in the work of Latour (1987, 1988) as a prominent person who enrolls allies, builds institutions, changes perceptions, and translates the message of free software in ways that appeal to a wider constituency. Just as Louis Pasteur served as the spokesperson who made the germ theory of illness compelling and intelligible to wider publics (Latour 1993), Lessig has worked assiduously, passionately, and diligently to bring out and successfully translate the artifacts and messages of F/OSS from the confines of the hacker lab out to the field.


pages: 392 words: 109,945

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

At one point in The Emergence of Life, he offered a definition of life, but it sounded more like a cry for help: “Life is what IS.” * * * — I never learned about Burke when I was growing up. I was taught the standard pantheon of biologists, which is mostly made up of scientists with ideas that turned out to be right: Darwin and his tree of life, Mendel and his genetic peas, Louis Pasteur and his disease-causing germs. It’s easier that way: to leapfrog from one designated hero to the next—to ignore the mirages along the way, the failures, the fame that curdled. When I started writing about biology, I still didn’t learn about Burke. I have had the good fortune to get to know many forms of life and many of the scientists who study them.


pages: 351 words: 112,079

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

In ‘favourable’ conditions, these microzymas would be turned into cells; however, in unfavourable host and environmental conditions, the microzymas would turn into bacteria and other microorganisms, resulting in disease. Béchamp called the process by which microzymas changed from one form to another, ‘pleomorphism’; essentially a form of spontaneous generation. Béchamp’s bitter rival at the time was Louis Pasteur (1822–95). Pasteur is regarded as the father of ‘germ theory’, that infection came from the outside. While he didn’t originally propose it, he performed the experiments showing that without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. Pasteur demonstrated that in sterilised and sealed flasks nothing would grow, whereas if he sterilised a flask and then left it open, bacteria and other microorganisms would rapidly grow, and in doing so proved that ‘germ theory’ was correct.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

There, his ideas could be tested, refined, and built upon to anchor what became the discipline we call physics and the community we identify as physicists. In his book The Scientific Attitude, another philosopher of science, Lee McIntyre, adduces a more recent example of how reality-based networks boot up.15 The nineteenth century was a time of momentous breakthroughs in the understanding of disease: Louis Pasteur and germ theory, Robert Koch and bacteriology, Joseph Lister and antiseptics. Yet throughout that century, and even into the early years of the twentieth, “For all its progress, medicine was not yet a science,” writes McIntyre. All kinds of cranks claimed to be doctors; practices and training were haphazard and unscientific; practitioners based their work on hunches and anecdotes; folk medicine and lay healing were standard treatments; the number of drugs which actually worked could be counted on the fingers of two hands.


Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The... by Sally Fallon, Pat Connolly, Mary G. Enig, Phd.

British Empire, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, out of africa, profit motive, the market place, the scientific method

Variation: Creamy Red Pepper Sauce Stir in ½ cup piima cream or creme fraiche. Variation: Thin Red Pepper Sauce Stir in ½ to 1 cup warm fish stock, chicken stock or beef stock until desired consistency is obtained. Once upon a time there was a scientific debate. The debate was between the ideas put forth by Louis Pasteur and the ideas outlined by Antoine Bechamp. The scientific community adopted the ideas of Pasteur and completely rejected the ideas of Bechamp. Because of that rejection, and the growth of dogma attached to the theories of Pasteur, our modern medical science may be digging a deep hole for all of us in our desires to overcome disease.

Add tomato, raise heat and saute a few minutes until liquid is almost all absorbed. Add zucchini, garlic, thyme and pepper. Saute about 1 minute more until flavors are amalgamated. Don't let zucchini overcook! Germs, viruses and other microorganisms are usually present, but merely as scavengers that feed on toxic wastes. While we must thank Louis Pasteur for annihilating the belief that disease was caused by demons and evil, substituting in its place the germ theory, we must not forget that Bechamp, who was a contemporary of Pasteur, strongly maintained that the chemical background on which the germ fed was of equal importance. Man had to choose between the two causes of disease: either the toxic background, due to faulty living and eating habits, was responsible for disease; or a mysterious microorganism, hiding in dark corners, pounced upon the innocent and unsuspecting victim.


pages: 396 words: 112,748

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

The heart of the experiment was even smaller, a cell about the size of a lemon seed, carved in stainless steel with the sharpest possible edges and walls. Into the cell was fed liquid helium chilled to about four degrees above absolute zero, warm compared to Libchaber’s old superfluid experiments. The laboratory occupied the second floor of the École physics building in Paris, just a few hundred feet from Louis Pasteur’s old laboratory. Like all good general-purpose physics laboratories, Libchaber’s existed in a state of constant mess, paint cans and hand tools strewn about on floors and tables, odd-sized pieces of metal and plastic everywhere. Amid the disarray, the apparatus that held Libchaber’s minuscule fluid cell was a striking bit of purposefulness.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Fighting for liberty includes anything that frees people from social, biological and physical constraints, be it demonstrating against brutal dictators, teaching girls to read, finding a cure for cancer, or building a spaceship. The liberal pantheon of heroes houses Rosa Parks and Pablo Picasso alongside Louis Pasteur and the Wright brothers. This sounds extremely exciting and profound in theory. Unfortunately, human freedom and human creativity are not what the liberal story imagines them to be. To the best of our scientific understanding, there is no magic behind our choices and creations. They are the product of billions of neurons exchanging biochemical signals, and even if you liberate humans from the yoke of the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union, their choices will still be dictated by biochemical algorithms as ruthless as the Inquisition and the KGB.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

In 1998, for example, a promising drug from Folkman’s lab was shown to eradicate tumors in mice. A page one New York Times story quoted the Nobel laureate James Watson saying, “Judah will cure cancer in two years” (Watson later challenged the quote). Media coverage exploded. Reporters compared Folkman to Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur; a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist who had been diagnosed with colon cancer wrote a column announcing, “Maybe we don’t have to die”; and patients besieged Folkman’s hospital for access to the drug, which was not yet in clinical trials. As with most new ideas in drug discovery, the first drug didn’t pan out.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Others were so hung up on the perceived deficiencies of Semmelweis’s theoretical explanation that they ignored the empirical evidence that the handwashing was improving mortality. After struggling to get his ideas adopted, Semmelweis went crazy, was admitted to an asylum, and died at the age of forty-seven. It took another twenty years after his death for his ideas about antiseptics to start to take hold, following Louis Pasteur’s unquestionable confirmation of germ theory. Like Wegener, Semmelweis didn’t fully understand the scientific mechanism that underpinned his theory and crafted an initial explanation that turned out to be somewhat incorrect. However, they both noticed obvious and important empirical truths that should have been investigated by other scientists but were reflexively rejected by these scientists because the suggested explanations were not in line with the conventional thinking of the time.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

The F protein swells, like an erection, burying the vulnerable epitope and effectively hiding it from the antibodies. McLellan’s challenge was to keep the F protein from getting an erection. Classically, vaccines are made from real viruses. One way is to weaken them to the point that they no longer cause illness but can still stir up an antibody response; that is how Louis Pasteur, one of the founding figures of microbiology, created a vaccine for cholera in chickens. Chemically inactivated viruses can fool the body into believing it is being infected; such vaccines have been used for encephalitis and rabies. But there was uncertainty. Immunologists were handicapped because they couldn’t clearly see what they were doing.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Bacteria can reproduce outside a host, but while some viruses can live for a short while outside a host, they can’t reproduce outside one. In the late eighteenth century, English surgeon Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox, the only infectious disease in human history ever to be eradicated, and around 1880, French biologist Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against cholera bacteria. But neither researcher pinpointed the microscopic virus we now understand as the causal agent of so much biological activity. It wasn’t until Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky experimented on diseased tobacco plants in 1892 that scientists began to understand viruses as we now imagine them.


pages: 476 words: 129,209

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon

British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, discovery of penicillin, housing crisis, index card, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

., father of the Supreme Court Justice, first promoted the practice in two papers published in the mid-nineteenth century, the more established Charles D. Meigs fired back that washing hands was unnecessary because doctors were gentlemen, and “gentlemen’s hands are clean.” Fortunately, Dr. Holmes’s position found proponents overseas, where Scottish doctor Joseph Lister picked up on Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology to champion antiseptic surgery, using carbonic acid to clean surgeons’ hands and tools. When survival rates soared, he worked to overcome resistance from doctors like Charles D. Meigs to spread the practice. One of Lister’s protégés, Dr. Joseph Lawrence, was so impressed by his mentor that, after Lawrence perfected his cure for halitosis, he named it after the pioneering doctor: Listerine.


pages: 384 words: 122,874

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee by Bee Wilson

air freight, Corn Laws, food miles, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, new economy, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair

Both wine-makers and the French state recognized a desperate need to set new norms for wine making, to find new definitions of what “wine” actually was. Special new laws were passed dealing with adulteration. In 1889, raisin wines were specifically outlawed; in 1891, the practice of “chalking” was prohibited; in 1894, it was forbidden to sell either watered-down wines or wines laced with extra alcohol.41 In the meantime, Louis Pasteur had began to establish the science that would fi nally enable reliable avoidance of some of the most common failings in wine, without recourse to swindling. In the 1860s, Pasteur identified many of the microorganisms that caused different faults in the bottle. An excess bitterness was due to degraded glycerol; flabbiness was caused by a polysaccharide.


Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production by Vaclav Smil

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Pearl River Delta, precision agriculture, recommendation engine, The Design of Experiments

During the 1830s he maintained that the decomposition of organic matter into acids and alcohols is nothing but a purely inorganic chemical reaction.7 Thanks to more powerful microscopes, Theodor Schwann (1810–1882) and Charles Cagniard-Latour (1777–1859) were able to observe a clear correlation between growing Saccharomyces yeasts and alcoholic fermentation of grape juice, but Liebig retorted with a mechanistic explanation: atomic motions of the fermenting yeasts were breaking up molecules of grape sugar.8 The convincing explanation came in 1857 with Louis Pasteur’s (1822–1895) demonstration of the microbial nature of organic decomposition, but the process of biomass breakdown was satisfactorily explained only after Hans Buchner’s (1850–1902) accidental discovery of the first enzyme in 1897 opened a new era of biochemistry.9 Discovering Nitrogen Advances in the early understanding of intricate transfers of nitrogen among the atmosphere, soils, waters, and living organisms were no less complicated and controversial than was the elucidation of carbon pathways in photosynthesis, respiration, and decay.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

The historians Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz point out that in the nineteenth century sociology, which focused on the internal dynamics of societies rather than on their external environments, and anthropology, which began seeking out biological differences, provided new accounts of why people in different places lived in different ways. And the previously unimagined germs that Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch brought to humanity’s notice in the 1870s and 1880s led to accounts of disease that greatly reduced the role previously ascribed to the malign influences of bad climates. New explanations focusing on races and germs came to be built into the way societies were shaped, as well as the way they were talked about.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Befitting the great westward expansion, in the nineteenth century it was America’s pioneer spirit and can-do attitude that produced the world’s great inventors and implementers, including Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla, but Europe was still the home of real science and the scientists who made the fundamental theoretical breakthroughs, including Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Max Planck, Alfred Nobel, and Lord Kelvin. This focus on tinkering and engineering versus science and discovery was partly because America lacked the well-established academies of Europe, but it also seemed to have something to do with the American character itself. French political scholar Alexis de Tocqueville noted this focus on pragmatism when he toured America in 1831 and 1832.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

There were over 50,000 amputations in the American Civil War, and infections followed, the spectre of death hard on their tail.16 Tetanus had a mortality rate of 89 per cent and pyaemia, a type of septicaemia, killed 97 per cent of those who developed it.17 So devastating were these odds that, by the Spanish-American War of 1898, the medical profession recognised the urgent need for antisepsis. After reading findings by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister carried out experiments using carbolic acid and found it helped massively reduce the patient’s chances of dying if applied following amputations.18 Antiseptic dressings on the battlefield and saline solutions to hydrate patients were also brought into play – innovations conceived on the bloody, ragged fields of war.


The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, Bronwen Godfrey

Community Supported Agriculture, Haight Ashbury, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi

Yeast likes a neutral to slightly acid pH, and some oxygen too, though it can get on without it for a while. When plenty of oxygen is available, yeast metabolizes its food completely, multiplying energetically and giving off carbon dioxide and water as waste products. This efficient metabolic process is called respiration, and its discovery by Louis Pasteur was what made the commercial manufacture of yeast possible: bubbling air through the nutrient solution keeps the yeast metabolism efficient and its waste products harmless. When there is not much oxygen—as in bread dough, where the oxygen is rather quickly used up—yeast adapts by changing its metabolism from aerobic respiration to anaerobic fermentation.


pages: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

To explain how microorganisms slowly develop in water previously sterilized by boiling, Huygens proposed that they were small enough to float through the air and reproduced on alighting in water. Thus he established an alternative to spontaneous generation—the notion that life could rise, in fermenting grape juice or rotting meat, entirely independent of preexisting life. It was not until the time of Louis Pasteur, two centuries later, that Huygens’ speculation was proved correct. The Viking search for life on Mars can be traced in more ways than one back to Leeuwenhoek and Huygens. They are also the grandfathers of the germ theory of disease, and therefore of much of modern medicine. But they had no practical motives in mind.


pages: 457 words: 128,640

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times by Lucy Lethbridge

Ada Lovelace, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, country house hotel, decarbonisation, garden city movement, high net worth, invisible hand, Louis Pasteur, new economy, period drama, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social web, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

This refreshes their minds as well as their bodies, and drives out all impurities in consequence of the shut-in rooms and closed doors of the night.’22 The home became viewed as a laboratory for the new science of hygiene and health. The work of nineteenth-century scientists and supporters of germ theory, such as Joseph Lister, with his pioneering work on antiseptics, and Louis Pasteur, the microbiologist who developed vaccines, had led to a mania for sterilisation – increasingly interpreted by housework pundits not only as a key to public health but also to private virtue and inner purity. The Cassell’s Household Guide warned that dust was ‘impregnated with millions of more or less deadly microbes’.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

Anytime the causal effect of X on Y is confounded by one set of variables (C) and mediated by another (M) (see Figure 7.2), and, furthermore, the mediating variables are shielded from the effects of C, then you can estimate X’s effect from observational data. Once scientists are made aware of this fact, they should seek shielded mediators whenever they face incurable confounders. As Louis Pasteur said, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Fortunately, the virtues of front-door adjustment have not remained completely unappreciated. In 2014, Adam Glynn and Konstantin Kashin, both political scientists at Harvard (Glynn subsequently moved to Emory University), wrote a prize-winning paper that should be required reading for all quantitative social scientists.


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

In 1958, the scientists Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl set up an experiment that was a tweak away from Haldane’s ingenious solution, labeling DNA strands with heavy nitrogen and tracking how they reprinted themselves. For its elegance and clarity, science historians call it “the most beautiful experiment in biology”—a glorious irony, given how Haldane, its progenitor, was among the clumsiest experimenters of his time. For Haldane, the model scientist was always Louis Pasteur, who in the nineteenth century developed vaccines, discovered how to halt the contamination of milk, and tripped up the headlong spread of disease. His influence, Haldane thought, was supreme—greater even than Darwin’s. Darwin changed the intellectual beliefs of his time, and his appeal was almost entirely to reason.


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

In this sense, the ultimate “informational” molecule is DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, which is made of proteins and amino acids that carry the genetic blueprint for and, in so many ways, define each and every species. If there is DNA in any form of life on Mars, one distinct difference may come from a discovery made by Louis Pasteur, the pioneer of vaccination and the heat treatment for liquids that bears his name. In the 1860s, Pasteur became curious when he saw dregs of wine left behind within their bottles. When he looked at their crystals under a microscope, Pasteur saw that they twisted the light in one direction. When the same crystals were synthesized in his laboratory, they twisted the other way.


pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

She was determined to write a biography of the Girondist Madame Roland while selling freelance articles to Pennsylvania and Ohio newspapers and attending classes at the Sorbonne. Hardworking and levelheaded, she mailed off two articles during her first week in Paris alone. Even though the prim Tarbell was taken aback when lascivious Frenchmen flirted with her, she adored her time in Paris. She interviewed eminent Parisians, ranging from Louis Pasteur to Emile Zola, for American newspapers and won many admirers for her clean, accurate reportage; she claimed that her writing had absorbed some of the beauty and clarity of the French language. Still, she struggled on the “ragged edge of bankruptcy” and was susceptible when McClure wooed her as an editor of his new magazine.

Pelton, was inspired by the cathedrals of Chartres and Laon. Formally dedicated in 1931, the church was an ecumenical shrine that seemed to bridge both the spiritual and temporal worlds. Instead of saintly statues lining the chancel screen, one found scientists, doctors, educators, social reformers, and political leaders, including Louis Pasteur, Hippocrates, Florence Nightingale, and Abraham Lincoln. Statues of Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses stared down from archivolts above the main portal, while Darwin and Einstein occupied honored niches. After a few years, the congregation was both interdenominational and interracial, with fewer than a third of the members coming from Baptist backgrounds.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Surveying the slum quarters by the harbour where the impact of the disease was greatest, and remembering the squalid dwellings he had seen in Egypt and India, Koch turned to his team and said: ‘Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe.’ At the height of Europe’s age of imperialism, it was hard to think of a more damning verdict. In addition to Koch, the French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822–95) had made significant discoveries based on the germ theory of disease, developing vaccines for anthrax and rabies, and inventing the technique of ‘pasteurization’ to heat milk and kill any germs it might be carrying. But direct medical intervention did little to prevent and still less to cure infectious diseases in the nineteenth century.

The situation was very different in France, where all twenty-two universities had been abolished by the Revolution in 1789 as bastions of privilege, corruption and idleness, and replaced by specialized faculties and colleges that offered training to lawyers, doctors and teachers. Some of these became in due course serious centres of learning and research, such as the École Normale Supérieure, founded in 1795 and re-founded in 1826, where the medical scientist Louis Pasteur pushed through a series of major reforms. (These were not always popular: when he threatened to expel any students caught smoking, seventy-three out of the eighty students in the grande école promptly resigned.) There were in general very few students at these institutions – the Faculty of Letters at Caen had only twenty under the Restoration, for example, while the Faculty of Letters at Clermont-Ferrand had only seven in 1876.


pages: 421 words: 147,305

The Medical Detectives by Berton Roueche

Albert Einstein, classic study, double entry bookkeeping, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, sugar pill

The scientific comprehension of anthrax, though late in taking recognizable shape, was accomplished with dispatch. Few diseases have been so thoroughly riddled so fast. In addition to being the first disease irrefutably laid to a germ, it was the first of its kind to yield to total penetration and control. The control of anthrax was initiated by Louis Pasteur in 1881. In the spring of that year, before a gathering of scientists assembled near Paris by the Agricultural Society of Melun, he demonstrated (on a flock of sheep) that an animal inoculated with a culture of heat-attenuated B. anthracis was rendered immune to anthrax. He also showed, in another study, that the burial of infected animal carcasses (as originally recommended by Virgil) was not enough to check the natural spread of the disease.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

This gave him many opportunities to become familiar with Pittsburgh and its business establishment, and Carnegie made the most of them. Soon he was an operator, working the telegraph himself and able to interpret it by ear, writing down the messages directly. His salary was up to $25 a month. In 1853, in a classic example of Louis Pasteur’s dictum that chance favors the prepared mind, Thomas A. Scott, general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a frequent visitor to the telegraph office where Carnegie worked, needed a telegraph operator of his own to help with the system being installed by the railroad. He chose Carnegie, not yet eighteen years old.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

—RICHARD FEYNMAN, NOBEL LAUREATE Nanotechnology has given us the tools to play with the ultimate toy box of nature—atoms and molecules. Everything is made from these, and the possibilities to create new things appear limitless. —HORST STORMER, NOBEL LAUREATE The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large. —LOUIS PASTEUR The mastery of tools is a crowning achievement that distinguishes humanity from the animals. According to Greek and Roman mythology, this process began when Prometheus, taking pity on the plight of humans, stole the precious gift of fire from Vulcan’s furnace. But this act of thievery enraged the gods.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Researchers into tropical diseases set up laboratories in the most far-flung African colonies – the one established in Saint-Louis in 1896 was among the first. Animals kept there were injected with trial vaccines: eighty-two cats injected with dysentery, eleven dogs with tetanus. Other labs worked on cholera, malaria, rabies and smallpox. Such efforts had their roots in the pioneering work on germ theory by Louis Pasteur in the 1850s and 1860s. Empire inspired a generation of European medical innovators. It was in Alexandria in 1884 that the German bacteriologist Robert Koch – who had already isolated the anthrax and tuberculosis bacilli – discovered Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that transmits cholera, which only the previous year had killed Koch’s French rival Louis Thuillier.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The most striking advance was in the war against death in childhood. In 1900, a tenth of children died in infancy. In some parts of the country, the figure was as high as one in four. In 2000, only one of about 150 babies died in their first year. Scientific advance played a role in this. The work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch led to the acceptance of the germ theory of disease and life-saving innovations such as pasteurized milk. Advancing knowledge led to better behavior: cities began to remove garbage, purify water supplies, and process sewage; citizens washed their hands and otherwise improved their personal habits.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Google’s “Prediction API” is increasing in sophistication and utility (we don’t know how broadly used it is). Those are extreme cases, but the basic pattern is seen in almost every data-rich firm. Once the data science capability has been developed for one application, other applications throughout the business become obvious. Louis Pasteur famously wrote, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Modern thinking on creativity focuses on the juxtaposition of a new way of thinking with a mind “saturated” with a particular problem. Working through case studies (either in theory or in practice) of data science applications helps prime the mind to see opportunities and connections to new problems that could benefit from data science.


pages: 492 words: 149,259

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

It would be all too easy to label scientists who have exploited serendipity as merely lucky, but that would be unfair. All these serendipitous scientists and inventors were able to build upon their chance observations only once they had accumulated enough knowledge to put them into context. As Louis Pasteur, who himself benefited from serendipity, put it: ‘Chance favours the prepared mind.’ Walpole also highlighted this in his original letter when he described serendipity as the result of ‘accidents and sagacity’. Furthermore, those who want to be touched by serendipity must be ready to embrace an opportunity when it presents itself, rather than merely brushing down their seed-covered trousers, pouring their failed superglue down the sink or abandoning a failed medical trial.


The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

Even if ‘the conditions for the first production of a living organism’ are still present, any such new production would be ‘instantly devoured or absorbed’ (presumably by bacteria, we would today have good reason to add), ‘which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed’. Darwin wrote this seven years after Louis Pasteur had said, in a lecture at the Sorbonne, ‘Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.’ The simple experiment was the one in which Pasteur showed, contrary to popular expectation at the time, that broth sealed off from access by micro-organisms would not spoil.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Bradford DeLong, ‘Cornucopia: The Pace of Economic Growth in the Twentieth Century’, 2000 NBER Working Paper No. 7602, p. 3. 22 Martin Arnold, ‘Profits of Buy-out Groups Tied to Debt’, Financial Times, 14 January 2009, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/da3c8954-e217-11dd-b1dd-0000779fd2ac.html. 23 Taken from Xavier Sala-i-Martin’s home page at Columbia University: http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/reject.htm. Consider these additional examples: Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, observed in 1872: ‘Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.’ Sir John Eric Ericksen, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1873, solemnly opined that ‘the abdomen, the chest and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon’. Most of the great advances of the late nineteenth century had their detractors – the electric light and the telephone were both predicted to have no future.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As Paul Samuelson wrote: ‘As the great Max Planck, himself the originator of the quantum theory in physics, has said, science makes progress funeral by funeral: the old are never converted by the new doctrines, they simply are replaced by a new generation.’ 15 Planck (like Samuelson, a man who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to paradigm shift) did not in fact say this, but he had expressed the sentiment in less pithy form. 16 The displacement of the narrative of miasma by the narrative of germs took several decades and in particular required the patient experimental work of the French scientist Louis Pasteur. As he edged towards the truth, Pasteur wrote ‘I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner’, famously adding ‘fortune favours the prepared mind’. 17 The willingness to challenge a narrative is a key element not only in scientific progress but in good decision-making.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, who described the conservation of energy in 1847, credited Goethe with anticipating the idea.14 In 1819, the seventy-year-old Goethe, once an avid coffee drinker, gave to a younger acquaintance whom he thought “quite promising”—a physician named Friedlieb Runge—a box of coffee beans from the port of Mocha and a challenge to figure out what was inside them, how they worked, what they did, what invisible connections they had to the wider world. At the time there was little clarity about the cause and nature of coffee’s effects on the human body: it had confounded centuries of medical thought based on the humoral system, and modern medicine was barely in its infancy—Louis Pasteur, for example, was not even born. Runge was up to Goethe’s challenge. After a few months of work, he isolated an alkaloid, a plant base, which he called Kaffeine—a compound of the German for “coffee” plus the suffix “ine,” from the Latin for “of the nature of.”15 For some time, the terms of this discovery were strictly enforced.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Lifespans in the United Kingdom have more than doubled in the past 150 years, in no small part because of innovations that were made in direct response to the overcrowding in it that the early-nineteenth-century parliamentarian William Cobbett derisively called the Great Wen, a nickname that compared the city to a swelling, pus-filled, sebaceous cyst. The movement from miasmatic theory to germ theory, meanwhile, fundamentally shifted ideas about how to combat all sorts of other diseases, setting the stage for Louis Pasteur’s breakthroughs in fermentation, pasteurization, and vaccination. The ripples are manifold and can be measured, without the slightest hint of hyperbole, in hundreds of millions of human lives. If it hadn’t been for the advances that came out of that period of our history, billions upon billions of people would not be alive today.


pages: 732 words: 151,889

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets

clean water, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, Exxon Valdez, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, phenotype, precautionary principle

By exploring these relationships, we may be able to adapt new techniques for controlling insects without harming the environment. In 1834, Agustino Bassi noticed that spores of the fungus Beauveria bassiana were causing the disease muscardine, a plague that imperiled the international silk trade. He is credited with conceiving “germ theory,” a major tenet of modern medicine, well before Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microbes in 1858. As more entomopathogenic fungi were observed, often found on the moldy carcasses of dead insects, the pesticide industry explored the use of fungal spores as natural insecticides. Since the 1990s, several patents have been awarded exploiting these mold fungi, raising expectations for treatments in the emerging field of entomopathogenic mycology.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

Since 2017, Antwerp also has an exciting new local pintje with ’t Eiland’s Seef, a carefully researched reincarnation of what had been one of Belgium’s oldest brews till the recipe was ‘lost’ after WWII. More associated with local grandmothers is elixir d’Anvers, a saccharin-sweet, bright-yellow liqueur made in Antwerp since 1863 and reputed to aid digestion – Louis Pasteur awarded it a diploma in 1887. From May to September, a number of summer pop-up bars open, some at the riverside, others in parks. This Is Antwerp (www.thisisantwerp.be) lists the current crop. At nightclubs, Thursdays tend to be cheaper (or free) for students. 6Centre Numerous old-world ‘brown cafes’ ooze atmosphere, including Grote Markt classic Den Engel (map Google map; www.cafedenengel.be; Grote Markt 3; h9am-2am), calm, mirror-panelled De Kat (map Google map; %03-233 08 92; www.facebook.com/cafeDeKat; Wolstraat 22; hnoon-2am Mon-Sat, 5pm-2am Sun), lively and inexpensive Pelikaan (map Google map; Melkmarkt 14; h8am-late), and several options that spread summer seating onto the tree-shaded square at Graanmarkt, notably De Duifkens (map Google map; Graanmarkt 5; h10am-late Mon-Thu, from noon Fri-Sun).


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Although his urban dream was never realised, Ledoux’s semicircular saltworks is now listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Regular trains link Besançon and Arc-et- Senans (€6.10, 30 minutes, up to 10 daily). Route Pasteur Almost every single town in France has at least one street, square or garden named after Louis Pasteur, the great 19th-century chemist who invented pasteurisation and developed the first rabies vaccine. In the Jura, it is even more the case since the illustrious man was a local lad, born and raised in the region, and a regular visitor for holidays (he worked mostly in Paris). Pasteur was born in Dole, 20km west of Arc-et-Senans along the D472.

His childhood home, La Maison Natale de Pasteur ( 03 84 72 20 61; www.musee-pasteur.com; 43 rue Pasteur; adult/student/under 12yr €5/3/free; 10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun Jul & Aug, 10am-noon & 2-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun Apr-Jun, Sep & Oct, 10am-noon & 2-6pm Sat & Sun Nov-Mar), overlooking the Canal des Tanneurs in the old town, is now an atmospheric museum housing letters, artefacts and exhibits including his university cap and gown. In 1827 the Pasteur family settled in the rural community of Arbois (population 3509), 35km east of Dole. His laboratory and workshops in Arbois are on display at La Maison de Louis Pasteur ( 03 84 66 11 72; 83 rue de Courcelles; adult/7-15yr €5.80/2.90; guided tours hourly 9.45-11.45am & 2-6pm Jun-Sep, 2.15-5.15pm Apr, May & 1-15 Oct). The house is still decorated with its original 19th-century fixtures and fittings. Route du Vin No visit to Arbois, the Jura wine capital, would be complete without a glass of vin jaune.

Construction began in the 13th century, and was completed in 1451; the mismatched materials in some ways resemble Lego blocks. Above the north aisle are three lovely stained-glass windows, the oldest, in the Chapelle Saint Jérôme, dating from 1531. The entrance to the stately 13th-century cloister ( 9am-12.30pm & 2-6pm Jun-Sep, to 5pm Oct-May) is on place Louis Pasteur. MUSEUMS The seafaring history, traditions and cultural identity of the unique Basque people are all explored at the Musée Basque et de l’Histoire de Bayonne ( 05 59 59 08 98; www.musee-basque.com, in French; 37 quai des Corsaires; adult/student/under 18yr €5.50/3/free; 10am-6.30pm daily Jul & Aug, closed Mon Sep-Jun) through exhibits including a reconstructed farm and the interior of a typical etxe (home).


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

For those, it proved remarkably difficult to refute spontaneous generation experimentally. For instance, experiments could not be done in airtight containers in case air was necessary for spontaneous generation. But it was finally refuted by some ingenious experiments conducted by the biologist Louis Pasteur in 1859 – the same year in which Darwin published his theory of evolution. But experiment should never have been needed to convince scientists that spontaneous generation is a bad theory. A conjuring trick cannot have been performed by real magic – by the magician simply commanding events to happen – but must have been brought about by knowledge that was somehow created beforehand.


pages: 692 words: 167,950

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

Yet his glee is also a reminder of what is at stake every time we take a drink from the tap, wash off in the shower, hose our lawn, turn on the computer, douse a fire, or manufacture a computer chip. His exuberance at finding a new supply in a time of drought—“pure, clean and cold”—was also a sigh of relief, a shout of triumph over the primal terror of having nothing let to drink. Acknowledgments “Chance favors the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur said, and so it was with this book. I have always had a special fascination with water and have spent a lot of time in, on, and around it. But I didn’t think of writing a book about H2O until the day Julia Child and I shared a bottle of water at lunch. We were collaborating on her memoir, My Life in France, and she explained how the French consider spring water a healthy “digestive” and enjoy its mineral terroir, while Americans consider bottled water a refreshing “beverage” and prefer it without any taste.


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

.* Among the scores of physicists who took notice of Röntgen’s detection of X rays was Henri Becquerel, a third-generation student of phosphorescence who shared with his father and grandfather a fascination with anything that glowed in the dark. Becquerel’s discovery, like Röntgen’s, was accidental, though both illustrated the validity of Louis Pasteur’s dictum that chance favors the prepared mind. Between experiments in his laboratory in Paris, Becquerel stored some photographic plates wrapped in black paper in a drawer. A piece of uranium happened to be sitting on top of them. When Becquerel developed the plates several days later, he found that they had been imprinted, in total darkness, with an image of the lump of uranium.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder,26 Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder.27 Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on.28 This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye. Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-5 psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice.


A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski

California gold rush, City Beautiful movement, clean water, cotton gin, David Brooks, fail fast, gentleman farmer, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, joint-stock company, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, New Urbanism, place-making, scientific management, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban renewal

He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country’s first regional plans. Above all, he was an artist who chose to work in a medium that then—even more than now—lacked public recognition. He was an innovator and a pioneer largely by chance. But, as Louis Pasteur, an exact contemporary of Olmsted, once observed, “Chance favors only the mind that is prepared.” Olmsted’s preparation was not based on formal training or education. What laid the groundwork for his later achievements was an amalgam of sensibility and temperament, coupled with an unusual set of formative experiences.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

But even without unusual epidemics, the general pall of death that hung over every family didn’t began to dissolve until 1796. That year, British surgeon Edward Jenner discovered a vaccine for smallpox, a disease that used to knock back our numbers each year by the millions. Jenner’s cure was also the first vaccine for anything. It inspired nineteenth-century French chemist Louis Pasteur to develop others, against rabies and anthrax. Pasteur made two other key contributions to human survival. One was the familiar process our dairies still use. Pasteurization extended the shelf life of milk, which improved nutrition and reduced infections from pathogens such as salmonella and those causing scarlet fever, diphtheria, and tuberculosis.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Source: Piramal Enterprises third quarter FY2016 results presentation, February 2016. I had been closely following Piramal for many months, but it was this tiny bit of information in one of its filings that was the catalyst for my investment at the attractive prevailing price. I subsequently realized a handsome profit. Louis Pasteur rightly said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” There is no alternative to hard work. CHAPTER 30 ACKNOWLEDGING THE ROLE OF LUCK, CHANCE, SERENDIPITY, AND RANDOMNESS We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance of occurrence of monstrous proportions.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

In 1912 Henry Holmes of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education summed up the mood in a concise paragraph: As a movement for social justice democracy must make real the vision of Lincoln – ‘a fair chance and an unfettered start in life for every child’; must keep open ‘the road to talent’, which seemed to Napoleon the essence of the matter; must provide genuine equality of opportunity so that every man may be able, in the spirit of that superior definition which President Eliot [of Harvard] likes to quote from Louis Pasteur, ‘to make the most of himself for the common good’.33 In America, progressives updated Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a ‘natural aristocracy’ of talents in terms of an ‘aristocracy of brains’ selected by scientific tests and promoted via a national education system. In Britain, they updated the intellectual aristocracy’s vision of a peaceful transfer of power from the old landed elite to a new aristocracy of talent.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

If Nordau had included “stare constantly at a blinking screen instead of living in the material world,” he would have been a prophet with a Nostradamus-like following, yet he seems to have been nearly alone with these trepidations, for everyone else in his era believed that scientific progress would solve all problems, fix all economies, end all war, and create a civilized, Edenic planet. Louis Pasteur referred to laboratories as temples of humanity, and a sensation running for three decades in both France and Italy was Luigi Manzotti’s 1881 Excelsior ballet, which chronicled the triumph of the Enlightenment over Darkness, ending with love, brotherhood, progress, and science. This fantasy ended in 1914, and as historian Barbara Tuchman noted, “A phenomenon of such extended malignancy as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age.”


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

His autopsy showed a similar pathology to the women with puerperal sepsis, leading Semmelweis to conclude that it was the doctors themselves who were causing the deaths of the mothers. Semmelweis implemented a strict hand-washing policy in his clinic, and the death rate quickly fell from 18 percent to 2.2 percent. But even Semmelweis himself couldn’t explain exactly why his method worked. It would be decades before Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease. Without this underlying explanation, Semmelweis’s discovery was largely rejected as a “mania.” Later in life, in part due to the lack of success he had in spreading his theories, Semmelweis fell into a deep depression, writing bitter letters to prominent European obstetricians in which he accused them of being ignorant murderers.


pages: 667 words: 186,968

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, conceptual framework, coronavirus, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, index card, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, means of production, scientific management, seminal paper, statistical model, the medium is the message, the scientific method, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

At a time when no government funds went to research, as both chairman of the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and president—for thirty-two years—of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), he had also directed the flow of money from the two greatest philanthropic organizations in the country. And yet Welch had been no great pioneer even in his own field of medical research—no Louis Pasteur, no Robert Koch, no Paul Ehrlich, no Theobald Smith. He had generated no brilliant insights, made no magnificent discoveries, asked no deep and original questions, and left no significant legacy in the laboratory or in scientific papers. He did little work—a reasonable judge might say he did no work—so profound as to merit even membership in, much less the presidency of, the National Academy of Sciences.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Ideas had little chance to encounter new mental environments; cultures of that time appear to have been incredibly traditionalist by modern standards. Slowly, as populations grew, ideas encountered new mental environments. People became more innovative and competitive about their innovations. A chance discovery led some cultures to switch from stone tools to metal tools—but as Louis Pasteur once said, chance favors the prepared mind. Writing, literacy, the printing press: these inventions allowed ideas to flow to millions of different mental environments. Each person became a test-bed for the usefulness of an idea. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there may have been only a few thousand people who really understood the usefulness of James Watt’s steam engine.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

The following tables are comprised of three columns: ingredient, cooking use, and sports/health use. In the last column, most notes are mine; any claims in quotations come directly from manufacturers and don’t represent our endorsements. If you don’t know a given term, skip it and we’ll cover it all later. And now, to a list fit for Louis Pasteur or Lou Ferrigno. Use it for cooking or performance/physique enhancement.4 All items can be found at fourhourchef.com/molecular. SKIP THIS TABLE IF IT STRESSES YOU OUT, M’KAY? ANTIOXIDANTS (SLOW DOWN OXIDATION REACTIONS) INGREDIENT: Ascorbic Acid (aka vitamin C) COOKING USE: Prevents browning of fruits and vegetables.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

Oops, No It Isn’t: Why Clinical Research Can’t Guarantee the Right Medical Answers. Springer. Gawande, Atul, 2002, Complications: A Surgeon’s Note on an Imperfect Science. Picador. Geach, Peter, 1966, “Plato’s Euthyphro,” The Monist 50: 369–382. Geison, Gerald L., 1995, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gems, D., and L. Partridge, 2008, “Stress-Response Hormesis and Aging: That Which Does Not Kill Us Makes Us Stronger.” Cell Metabolism 7(3): 200–203. Gibbert, M. and P. Scranton, 2009, “Constraints as Sources of Radical Innovation? Insights from Jet Propulsion Development.”


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Marglin implies that the British pretty quickly succeeded in replacing variolation with vaccination, but Sumit Guha, an Indian colleague who has also studied these matters, believes that it is unlikely that the British had either the personnel or the power to stamp out variolation so quickly. 49. Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 77, cited in Marglin, "Losing Touch," p. 112. For the scientific career of vaccination and its application to anthrax and rabies, see Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 50. There were literally thousands of competitors for cures and preventatives, as there always are with diseases that seem incurable. 51. Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 144 (emphasis in original).


pages: 695 words: 189,074

Fodor's Essential Israel by Fodor's Travel Guides

bike sharing, call centre, coronavirus, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, sensible shoes, starchitect, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The Jaffa $$$$ | HOTEL | Ultra-exclusive (and with a price tag to match), The Jaffa is the chicest of all Tel Aviv’s trendy new boutique hotels. Pros: Tel Aviv’s most Instagrammable hotel; dreamy pool with loungers; excellent dining and drinking options. Cons: not so easy on the wallet; quite far from the city center; more style than substance. D Rooms from: $750 E 2 Louis Pasteur St., Jaffa P 03/504–2000 wwww.marriott.com a 120 rooms X No Meals. H JOJO Boutique Hotel $ | HOTEL | If you’re looking for a budget accommodation that’s modern, clean, and well located, look no further than this modest, friendly hotel with eight rooms. Pros: super affordable and modern; friendly staff; spotlessly clean.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Their brother, Robert Wood (Johnson three), joined the firm shortly after its founding, infusing it with both a dose of needed capital and medical knowledge—the latter informed by the latest thinking in the then-fast-developing field of medical science. Johnson was one of the first American disciples of Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who, in developing the art of antiseptic surgery, successfully applied Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease to operating room practices. Johnson had become an advocate of antiseptics after attending a lecture given by Lister in 1876, at which the great scientist described the need for sterile surgical dressings to combat infection.1 One of the first products J&J introduced under Robert Wood’s leadership was sterile medicinal plasters (forerunner of Band-Aids), followed in subsequent years by ligatures, maternity and obstetric products, and the still-marketed Johnson’s Baby Powder.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The scion of a Wall Street rainmaker, the product of both Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he was less narrowly focused on the next technology than some of his engineer rivals, and more broadly interested in financial markets, business models, and even government policy. He read widely, theorized fluently, and wrote a series of internal papers codifying the Accel approach. It was he who had come up with the Accel watchword, “prepared mind,” having borrowed it from the nineteenth-century father of microbiology, Louis Pasteur. “Chance favors only the prepared mind,” Pasteur had observed sagely. Patterson was tall, slender, and possessed of a certain patrician eccentricity. He once surprised a new Accel recruit by serving him a dinner consisting of nothing but twelve ears of grilled corn and exceptional Bordeaux from his wine cellar.[10] Jim Swartz, for his part, contrasted just as much with Kleiner Perkins, but for different reasons.


pages: 622 words: 194,059

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, company town, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, haute couture, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, power law, security theater, Upton Sinclair, working poor

His family emigrated when he was seven and settled in New York, where Muni became a star on the Yiddish stage and later on Broadway. He came to Hollywood in 1929 and quickly won an Oscar nomination, but after a second film he returned to the stage. When he came back to Hollywood, starring in Scarface as a knockoff of Al Capone and in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and later as a Frenchman in The Story of Louis Pasteur, a Chinese in The Good Earth, and a Mexican in Juarez, he assumed stature as one of Hollywood’s most distinguished actors. At the same time his career became a paradigm for the tortured identity of the actor Jew in Hollywood—always dressed in someone else’s ethnicity. A man of almost desperate intensity and equally desperate loneliness, he was, according to his friend Hy Kraft, “one of the unhappiest men I ever met.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

After marrying Anheuser’s daughter, Busch ended up operating his father-in-law’s brewery. But brewing was not an especially difficult or capital-intensive business to get into. By definition, every brewery was micro. But several factors allowed German culture to scale beyond local confines. With Louis Pasteur’s discovery, pasteurization allowed for a longer shelf life, making wider distribution possible. Next, following the initial use of large blocks of winter ice, new innovations allowed for more refined techniques of refrigeration in railcars. Using both, Busch was one of the early pioneers in taking his beer farther west and south, all to avoid the large Milwaukee brewers fighting over Chicago and other midwestern markets.


pages: 1,249 words: 207,227

The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook: A Master Baker's 300 Favorite Recipes for Perfect-Every-Time Bread-From Every Kind of Machine by Beth Hensperger

back-to-the-land, Louis Pasteur, Silicon Valley, spice trade

Fast-acting yeast and bread machine yeast both work well in the bread machine; quick-rise yeast can also be used. The most readily available fast-acting or instant yeast comes from the S.I. Lasaffre Company (a French company operating in Belgium and elsewhere), which has been producing commercial yeast since Louis Pasteur figured out how to isolate and cultivate single strains. This yeast, labeled “SAF Perfect Rise” or “SAF Instant” yeast, is very popular among bread machine bakers. My testers and I nicknamed it the “industrial strength yeast” for its incredible and reliable rising power. Composed of a different strain of yeast than our domestic brands, SAF yeast is dried to a very low percentage of moisture and coated with ascorbic acid and a form of sugar, enabling it to activate immediately on contact with warm liquid.


pages: 1,294 words: 210,361

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

In the postsurgical wards of the Glasgow infirmary, Lister had again and again seen an angry red margin begin to spread out from the wound and then the skin seemed to rot from inside out, often followed by fever, pus, and a swift death (a bona fide “suppuration”). Lister thought of a distant, seemingly unrelated experiment. In Paris, Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist, had shown that meat broth left exposed to the air would soon turn turbid and begin to ferment, while meat broth sealed in a sterilized vacuum jar would remain clear. Based on these observations, Pasteur had made a bold claim: the turbidity was caused by the growth of invisible microorganisms—bacteria—that had fallen out of the air into the broth.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

Like the Indian company Varun, which gives its workers, who used to own that land, thirty percent of the harvest, but of that thiry percent they are forced to sell seventy percent to the company at a price the company sets.” The journalists laughed, they gave each other complicit glances. It’s good when the bad guys are so obvious. Quoting Louis Pasteur, he told the journalists, “The facts only speak to you when you are ready to understand them.” He explained Pasteur was a chemist who found some incredible things in his microscope because he knew what to look for. He continued, “The important thing is to understand how the land grabs work, so you can recognize the facts they bring us, those we manage to obtain.”


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

After marrying Anheuser’s daughter, Busch ended up operating his father-in-law’s brewery. But brewing was not an especially difficult or capital-intensive business to get into. By definition, every brewery was micro. But several factors allowed German culture to scale beyond local confines. With Louis Pasteur’s discovery, pasteurization allowed for a longer shelf life, making wider distribution possible. Next, following the initial use of large blocks of winter ice, new innovations allowed for more refined techniques of refrigeration in railcars. Using both, Busch was one of the early pioneers in taking his beer farther west and south, all to avoid the large Milwaukee brewers fighting over Chicago and other midwestern markets.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

RAY: Well, if you're speaking for yourself, that's fine with 'me. But if you stay biological and don't reprogram your genes, you won't be around for very long to influence the debate. Nanotechnology: The Intersection of Information and the Physical World The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large. —LOUIS PASTEUR But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately, in the great future, we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! —RICHARD FEYNMAN Nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].


Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, flag carrier, G4S, game design, gentrification, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, information security, Khartoum Gordon, Louis Pasteur, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The acclaimed Bat Sheva Dance Company (www.batsheva.co.il), founded by Martha Graham in 1964, is based at Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Dellal Centre; it is led by celebrated choreographer Ohad Naharin (b 1952). The Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company (www.kcdc.co.il) performs around the country. For something completely different, catch a noisy, raucous, energetic performance by Jaffa-based Mayumana ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %03-681 1787; www.mayumana.com; 15 Louis Pasteur St), Israel’s answer to Stomp. In the realm of folk dancing, Israel is famous for the hora, brought from Romania by 19th-century immigrants. The best place to see folk dancing is at the Carmiel Dance Festival (www.karmielfestival.co.il), held over three days in early July in the central Galilee.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Over the last couple of centuries some interesting observations and developments have been made, suggesting that molecular systems that do not contain specific information encoding molecules, such as DNA, are able to exhibit life-like properties. This field of research originates in the mid-nineteenth century when scientists were trying to disprove the notion of “vitalism.” This was a viewpoint championed by the eminent scientist Louis Pasteur, who argued that the living essence in organism was a “special” quality that was preformed and could not be created by physical means. A number of scholars disagreed proposing that life was “merely” chemistry and not “special”’ at all. Life-like qualities of chemical systems were demonstrated in non-biological systems as early as the latter half of the nineteenth century when nonliving systems exhibited some properties that appeared rather “biological” in their manifestation but were not based on cells, or even cell extracts.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The sin of ingratitude may not have made the Top Seven, but according to Dante it consigns the sinners to the ninth circle of Hell, and that’s where post-1960s intellectual culture may find itself because of its amnesia for the conquerors of disease. It wasn’t always that way. When I was a boy, a popular literary genre for children was the heroic biography of a medical pioneer such as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, William Osler, or Alexander Fleming. On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Although Cockran’s agile questioning exposed Edison’s basic ignorance of the physical factors involved in death by electricity, he could not overcome the inventor’s reputation as the authority on things electrical. The Wizard had become the oracle, and his views prevailed. On August 3 a satisfied Edison and his young wife embarked on a leisurely trip to Europe that turned into a triumphal march. Feted and decorated everywhere he went, Edison met such fellow luminaries as Louis Pasteur and Werner von Siemens.37 While Edison was gone, another sensation broke on August 25 in the form of revelations in the New York Sun under the headline “FOR SHAME, BROWN!” Somehow the paper had obtained forty-five letters, later revealed to have been purloined from Brown’s locked desk, that unmasked his relationship with the Edison interests.


pages: 734 words: 244,010

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

From their positions with the lower limbs in correct anatomical relationship, it seemed that the whole skeleton had to be there, lying face downwards. Actually, it wasn't quite there but, after pondering the geological collapses in the area, Clarke deduced where it must be and, sure enough, Motsumi's chisel found it there. Clarke and his team were indeed lucky, but here we have a first-class example of that maxim of scientists since Louis Pasteur: 'Fortune favours the prepared mind.' Little Foot is still to be fully excavated, described and formally named, but preliminary reports suggest a spectacular find, rivalling Lucy in completeness but older. Although more human-like than chimpanzee-like, the big toe is more divergent than our toes.


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

improvers: apprentices whose period of indenture had been reduced on account of their having some experience of the trade, or those who had moved beyond menial tasks and were being put to more skilled jobs. what Socialism means: ‘Half our time as champions of Socialism is wasted in denials of false descriptions of Socialism; and to a large extent the anger, the ridicule, and the argument of the opponents of Socialism are hurled against a Socialism which has no existence except in their own heated minds’: Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (1893; 1895 edn.), 99. 7 Britons Never Shall Be Slaves: from ‘Rule Britannia’ (1740) by Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78). Blatchford used the line prominently and ironically in Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog (1906). disease germs: Louis Pasteur announced the connection between germs and disease in 1882. The building and decorating trades were unusually conscious of the fact since house design, materials, and furnishing changed in response. In Barrie’s Peter Pan (1905) the nurse Nana remains unconvinced by ‘this new-fangled talk about germs’.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

It’s almost impossible to imagine someone coming up with a revolutionary new insight without being steeped in the domain in an obsessive or near-obsessive manner. But since we are encroaching on Chapter 8’s discussion of scientific discovery, suffice it to say for the moment that great physicists, great mathematicians, and great scientists of any stripe are invariably involved with great passion in their discipline. Louis Pasteur once famously observed that “Chance favors the prepared mind”, and obsessed minds are nothing if not prepared! Were their owners not passionately obsessed, they would never be able to spot connections that for a long time had escaped the eyes of all their colleagues. This brings us back to the idea, considered in the previous chapter, that creativity cannot be turned on and off with a simple switch: in order to come up with creative analogies, one has to be possessed by an idea.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

ESSENTIAL ASYMMETRY ‘The universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.’19 This remark of the French poet Paul Valéry is at one and the same time a brilliant insight into the nature of reality, and about as wrong as it is possible to be. In fact the universe has no ‘profound symmetry’ – rather, a profound asymmetry. More than a century ago Louis Pasteur wrote: ‘Life as manifested to us is a function of the asymmetry of the universe … I can even imagine that all living species are primordially, in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic asymmetry.’20 Since then physicists have deduced that asymmetry must have been a condition of the origin of the universe: it was the discrepancy between the amounts of matter and antimatter that enabled the material universe to come into existence at all, and for there to be something rather than nothing.


pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

You have done great work and we thank you.’” Carnegie, who had not known about the award and had prepared no remarks, spoke extemporaneously of his regard for France, its friendship with Scotland and the United States, and the wisdom of its people, who had in a recent vote, with millions of ballots cast, chosen Louis Pasteur as the hero of French civilization, relegating their greatest soldier, Napoleon, to seventh on the list.13 IN MID-MAY, much later than usual, the Carnegie family and servants sailed from New York Harbor for their annual trip to Britain. The sea air cured the “grip” he had been suffering from, Carnegie wrote Morley upon arriving at the Oatlands Hotel near Weybridge in Surrey, where the family was to stay for ten days.


The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Ervin Knuth

Abraham Wald, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, G4S, Georg Cantor, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, NP-complete, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, sorting algorithm, Turing machine, Y2K

Phys. 27,1 A987), 205-207]. The best lower bound known so far is due to J.-C. Lafon and S. Winograd, who showed that 2n2 — 1 nonscalar multiplications are necessary, and mn + ns + m — n — 1 in the m x n x s case ["A lower bound for the multiplicative complexity of the product of two matrices," Centre de Calcul, Univ. Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, 1979)]. If all calculations must be done without division, slightly better lower bounds were obtained by N. H. Bshouty [SICOMP 18 A989), 759-765], who proved that mxnby nx s matrix multiplication mod 2 requires at least Z}fc=o |_ms/2feJ + \{n + (n mod j))(n — (n mod j) — j) +n mod j multiplications when n > s > j > 1; setting m = n = s and j s* lgn gives 2.5n2 — ^nlgn + O(n).


pages: 1,222 words: 385,226

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Burning Man, clean water, colonial rule, financial independence, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

One of the reasons I could remain for years on the run was that I love big cities, and feel completely confident and comfortable in them. The full range of a city boy’s suspicion and dread of the country rose up in me when I held that glass of freshly squeezed milk. It was warm to the touch. It smelled of the cow. There seemed to be things floating in the glass. I hesitated. I had the sense that Louis Pasteur was standing just behind me, looking over my shoulder at the glass. I could hear him. Er, I would boil that milk first, Monsieur, if I were you … I swallowed prejudice, fear, and the milk all at once, gulping it down as quickly as possible. The taste was not as bad as I’d expected it to be—creamy and rich, and with a hint of dried grasses within the bovine after-taste.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that Nature does not know it!