Edward Jenner

52 results back to index

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

Indeed, smallpox has killed more people than all other infectious diseases combined. In 1768, when Edward Jenner was thirteen years old and training as an apprentice apothecary in Chipping Sodbury, England, he approached a young milkmaid who appeared ill. “Are you coming down with the smallpox?” he asked. “I cannot take that disease,” she said, “for I have had the cowpox.” Cowpox was a disease that caused blisters on the udders of cows. Sometimes people who milked cows with cowpox would get these same blisters on their hands. Jenner was only a boy, so he didn’t give much thought to the milkmaid’s notion of what prevented diseases. But Edward Jenner remembered that conversation for the rest of his life.

…

In 1861 in Italy forty-one children got syphilis as a result of arm-to-arm transfer when a small amount of blood from one child in the chain, who had an undiagnosed case of the disease, was injected into others. 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.

…

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. Hilleman's science followed a long, rich tradition. 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.

Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit M.D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Edward Jenner, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, longitudinal study, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Tragedy of the Commons

In Austria, eleven members of the Hapsburg dynasty died of smallpox, as did rulers in Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. When European settlers brought smallpox to North America, they reduced the native population of seventy million to six hundred thousand. No disease was more feared, more destructive, or more loathsome than smallpox. In 1796, Edward Jenner invented a vaccine that eliminated smallpox from the face of the earth. The idea for how to make it wasn’t his. Jenner was a country doctor working in the hamlet of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, in southern England. In 1770, a milkmaid noticed that when she milked cows with blisters on their udders—and suffered the same blisters on her hands—she was protected against smallpox during the epidemics that periodically swept across the English countryside.

…

To test the milkmaid’s theory, on July 1, 1796, Jenner injected Phipps with pus taken from someone with smallpox; Phipps survived. In a let-ter to a friend, Jenner wrote, “But now listen to the most delightful part of my story. The boy has since been inoculated for the Smallpox which, as I ventured to predict, produced no effect. I shall now pursue my Experiments with redoubled ardor.” Edward Jenner inoculates his young son with smallpox vaccine. (Courtesy of Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.) Two years later, in 1798—after many similar experiments—Jenner published his observations in a monograph titled Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae. (The term vaccination is derived from the Latin vaccinae, meaning “of the cow.”)

…

Organizers made travel arrangements for a hundred thousand people to attend; as a consequence, it was the largest rally of its kind. Actors entertained protesters by playing “doctors riding cows and holding on by the tail, and mothers at upper windows clasping their infants, while policemen were trying to commit a legal burglary at the keyhole in the street below.” The highlight of the show was an effigy of Edward Jenner, hanged, decapitated, and taken to the local police station for arraignment. The spirit of the Leicester rally—a rally described at the time as “a perfect carnival of public merriment,” can be found in today’s anti-vaccine protests. In June 2006, organizers staged a rally in front of the CDC in Atlanta.

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine by Michael Mosley

Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, lockdown, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social distancing

Many people would like these surviving samples to be destroyed, to eliminate any possibility that the virus could escape; others argue that there is still much to learn from a scrap of genetic material that has killed more people than every other infectious disease, put together. Smallpox is the only viral infection we have managed to eradicate. So how did we do it? The Gloucester Doctor The hero of the smallpox vaccine story is an eighteenth-century English doctor called Edward Jenner. As a busy doctor he would have seen a lot of smallpox, which in England in the 1700s was responsible for the deaths of thousands of children every year. The best protection doctors could offer at the time was something called “variolation.” The Chinese had realized, hundreds of years earlier, that you could protect children against the full effects of smallpox by deliberately infecting them with scabs, taken from an infected patient, which had then been left out to dry for a while.

…

Then, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a Dorset farmer called Benjamin Jesty noticed that milkmaids who developed cowpox, which were unsightly pustules on their hands that came from touching the udders of infected cows, rarely got smallpox. He was so impressed by this observation that in 1774 he rubbed scrapings taken from a milkmaid with cowpox into the arms of his wife and two children during a smallpox epidemic. They all survived. The reason Dr. Edward Jenner is remembered, and Benjamin Jesty is not, is because Jenner decided to carry out an extraordinary experiment, which these days would be regarded as completely unethical. Yet it is also an approach that, if conducted more carefully, might prove to be the fastest and most effective way of testing a new Covid-19 vaccine.

…

They desperately needed a lot more money to take their vaccine to the next stage. I’m pleased to say that a few weeks later the health secretary announced the Imperial group were getting £22.5 million to take their work forward. The Oxford Vaccine Another major vaccine group are based at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, named after Edward Jenner. In an interesting twist of history, although it was Alexander Fleming at St Mary’s who first noticed that a penicillium mold could kill bacteria, it was scientists based in Oxford who in 1941 managed to make enough purified penicillin to treat the first human patient, a policeman called Albert Alexander.

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

Smallpox Causal agent Virus of the orthopoxvirus genus Transmission Respiratory route and also through pus from the rash of an infected person Symptoms High fever and pustular rash that left permanent scars Prevalence Eradicated in 1979; so far the only human infectious disease to be so Prevention Vaccination was highly effective Treatment There was no proven treatment but some antiviral drugs were thought to have had some benefit Caricature of Edward Jenner inoculating patients, who are then shown growing cow heads from parts of their anatomy, 1802. An ancient illustration shows Shitala seated on a donkey, a bowl in one of her four hands. In one of many versions of the story, the Hindu goddess is told that she will always be worshipped as long as she carries lentil seeds.

…

She, too, had come across the practice in Turkey. In 1721, when medical ethics left something to be desired, seven condemned prisoners in Newgate jail were offered the chance of escaping execution if they took part in an experiment. Unsurprisingly, they all agreed to be inoculated and they all survived. Then in 1796 the English physician Edward Jenner took the practice to a new level. Jenner grew up in rural Gloucestershire, where country people had long known that a mild disease that was common among milkmaids, known as cowpox, gave protection against smallpox. In a famous experiment, unthinkable today, Jenner inoculated his gardener’s son, eight-year-old James Phipps, not with smallpox but with cowpox and then exposed him to smallpox on several occasions.

…

The strain M. bovis mainly infects cattle, but humans can also catch what is known as bovine TB, usually through drinking infected milk. In the nineteenth century, doctors tried inoculating people with the bovine strain to see if it would protect them against the human variety. Their thinking was based on Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine (see here), which gave immunity against that disease by infecting the individual with the related, but much milder, cowpox. Unfortunately, the theory turned out to be disastrously wrong. M. bovis wreaked just as much havoc in the human body as did M. tuberculosis. History found in bones Early evidence of the disease was found in people living in the Eastern Mediterranean around nine thousand years ago in one of the first villages to show signs of agriculture and domesticated animals.

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

Vaccines aim to give your immune system this memory of what a dangerous virus looks like, so that you can tackle it effectively if you come across it, but without you having to get sick with the virus in the first place. They achieve this by presenting a harmless mimic of the virus to your immune system. There are various ways that vaccines can do this. The vaccinations against smallpox developed in the late eighteenth century by Edward Jenner used a related but less harmful virus, cowpox. Many traditional vaccines present the body with a weakened or inactivated version of the virus. Modern platform or ‘plug and play’ vaccine technologies use the latest understanding of how biology works to show the immune system only the part of the virus that it needs to recognise in order to produce an immune response.

…

It was perhaps the most egregious example of many exploitative experiments that were carried out on children, prisoners, senile patients and other vulnerable groups of people in the United States in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, in pursuit of the development of both drugs and vaccines.4 The exposure of these studies, and in particular of the Tuskegee experiment, led to legislation to prevent such things happening again. Any type of medical research on people, including vaccine studies, now requires approval from independent ethics committees, and informed consent from and appropriate communication with all participants. Other aspects of vaccine development have also caused problems in the past. In 1796 Edward Jenner, considered the father of immunology and the person who has saved more lives through his work than any other human, famously vaccinated James Phipps, the 8-year-old son of his gardener, with pus taken from a cowpox blister on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes.5 For decades afterwards, vaccination did not require the production of vials of vaccine as we now know them, but was ‘arm to arm’, transferring material from a blister on the skin of someone who had been vaccinated to the next recipient.

…

Sometimes we were frustrated at the way information got distorted or sensationalised in the reporting: some journalists had an agenda, and others did not take care to check the truth and simply presented as fact what another journalist had said. At the same time, this was our opportunity to reach audiences that normally would take no interest in our work, and to get verified and accurate information out into the world. We were always conscious that our founding father Edward Jenner’s big achievement was not vaccinating against smallpox. That was not his idea and like most scientists he was building on the work of others. What he did, that others didn’t, was publicise his findings and push for the widespread uptake of vaccination. The media as double-edged sword is not a new idea.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

It was particularly brutal in the eighteenth century, killing an average of four hundred thousand Europeans annually. However, one sector of society seemed to be spared the ravages. In villages and households where the virus wiped out entire families, milkmaids, for some reason, escaped unharmed. Toward the end of that century, a British doctor named Edward Jenner came up with a theory to explain this resistance. It was well known that people who survived one bout of smallpox did not contract it a second time. In previous decades, a number of people had sought protection by scratching their skin and infecting themselves with what they hoped would be minor cases of smallpox.

…

With vaccines, we humans figured out how to hack our own immune systems to defend ourselves. However, our advances are guided by moral choices, some of them valuing certain lives over others. This feeds skepticism around vaccines, and often resistance. A good starting point is the dynamic between Edward Jenner and eight-year-old James Phipps. Jenner’s goal, as a doctor and scientist, was to find a cure. In his view, many lives saved were worth far more than one life risked, especially that of a lowborn boy. On the social scale of eighteenth-century Britain, Jenner occupied a master’s caste. He had servants, including his landless gardener and the gardener’s son.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “people who get COVID-19 have behaved irresponsibly”: Alain Labrique et al., “Webinar: National Pandemic Pulse Round 1,” covidinequities.org, November 12, 2020, https://www.covidinequities.org/​post/​webinar-national-pandemic-pulse-round-1. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT smallpox was much more deadly: Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox Vaccination,”Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 18, no. 1 (2005), https://www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​08998280.2005.11928028. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a debunked and retracted 1998 paper: A. Sabra, J. A. Bellanti, and A.

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

Although the incidence and death rates have fallen in the Western world since the introduction of screening, this is not the case in developing countries, whichad to lifelong Chapter 8 Turning the tables It is curiously paradoxical that the prevention of several virus infections was achieved long before anyone knew of the existence of viruses or of the immune responses required to prevent infection. Whereas viruses were first recognized in the 1930s, over 100 years before this, Edward Jenner (1749–1823) succeeded in vaccinating against to induce immunity without severearItpublishsmallpox, the biggest killer virus of all time. Smallpox prevention and eradication The first recorded way of preventing smallpox was inoculation, used in China and India for hundreds of years before it reached Western Europe in the 1700s.

…

Indeed, inoculation did sometimes cause full-blown smallpox and had a mortality rate of 1-2%, but this compares with a 10-20%; death rate from smallpox among the un-inoculated. The technique was used widely in Europe and the USA until the safer method of vaccination was introduced at the beginning of the 19th century. Edward Jenner was a country doctor from Berkeley, Gloucestershire, UK, where it was rumoured that milkmaids’ unblemished skin was due to contracting cowpox, a natural infection of cows’ udders, and thereafter being immune from smallpox. These rumours possibly stemmed from Benjamin Jesty (1736–1816), a farmer from Dorset, who was probably the first to test this theory, in 1774, when he inoculated his wife and children with cowpox, but he did not pursue the experiment any further.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Bray, Armies of Pestilence: The Effects of Pandemics on History (Cambridge, U.K.: James Clark, 2004), 114. 31 An English scientist and naturalist named Edward Jenner: “Jenner and Smallpox,” The Jenner Museum, n.d., http://www.jennermuseum.com/Jenner/cowpox.html. 31 Jenner tried inoculating Phipps: Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Center 2005;18(1): 21–25. 31 Nelmes was infected: “Campus Curiosities (10): Edward Jenner’s Cow, St. George’s, University of London,” The Times Higher Education (London), July 22, 2005. 32 The relative safety of the cowpox vaccine: Catherine Mark and Jose Rigau-Perez, “The World’s First Immunization Campaign,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2009;83(1): 63–94. 33 Anne Harrington calls the feeling: Anne Harrington, The Cure Within (New York: W.

…

I’m going a-milking sir, she said. What’s your fortune, my pretty maid? My face is my fortune, sir, she said.”) It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that gentlemen farmers across Europe began more actively exploring the reasons why this might be the case. An English scientist and naturalist named Edward Jenner, among others, speculated it could have to do with the milkmaids’ frequent contact with open blisters on the udders of cowpox-infected cows. In 1796, Jenner enlisted a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps to test his theory. Jenner transferred pus from Nelmes’s cowpox blisters onto incisions he’d made in Phipps’s hands.

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

Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 180–82, 189–91, 195. 20George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). Chapter 12: Valuable Inefficiency 1Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 18, no. 1 (January 2005). 2Eventually, a more effective agent for vaccination was found using the germs for a disease other than cowpox. 3The Pasteur story is from Riedel, “Edward Jenner,” and Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 112–13. 4Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), 23–42. 5Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), 17–19, 55–57. 6Koestler, The Act of Creation, 120. 7Robert A.

…

But to many people, the benefits seemed worth the risk. George Washington, for example, ordered that his troops be variolated after a smallpox epidemic undermined American efforts to conquer Quebec during the Revolutionary War. A few years earlier, a teenage medical student in England had visited a sick dairymaid near Bristol. When Edward Jenner suggested to his patient that she might have smallpox, the dairymaid replied “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox,” exp-ressing the widespread belief—then unproven within the scientific community—that victims of a fairly mild disease common among people who handled cattle were immune to the more serious smallpox.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Viktor Zhdanov, attended the annual meeting of the WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly. It was the first time a Soviet delegation had attended since the WHO’s founding a decade earlier. Zhdanov urged the organization to mount a global campaign to eradicate smallpox once and for all. In a nod to the United States, he quoted in his speech a letter Thomas Jefferson had written to Edward Jenner, who had pioneered the smallpox vaccine. “Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed,” Jefferson wrote. It was an early attempt to put into action Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalin plan of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. The United States was resistant at first, not least for thinking the Soviet proposal would pull attention away from American-led efforts to eradicate malaria.

…

Viktor Zhdanov: This account of US-Soviet collaboration on smallpox comes from the Harvard historian Erez Manela, in his excellent and authoritative “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (April 2010), https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/manela/files/manela-pox-dh.pdf. He quotes Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Edward Jenner, May 14, 1806, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 241 officially eradicated: “Smallpox,” US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last reviewed July 12, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/index.html. Credits Portions of “Lesson Nine: The World Is Becoming Bipolar” and “Lesson Ten: Sometimes the Greatest Realists Are the Idealists” draw on “The Self-Destruction of American Power.”

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

The way was now open for Banks to publish his own journal, over 200,000 words in manuscript, together with some of the hundreds of beautiful illustrations and line drawings he had commissioned. A folio volume of 800 plates was planned, together with extensive journal extracts. Solander agreed to help him with the cataloguing and editorial work, and various assistants were hired, including the young Edward Jenner. It was intended as the greatest scientific publication of Banks’s lifetime, his masterpiece. 9 The Pacific voyage, despite its final horrors of sickness and death, had not dampened Banks’s scientific wanderlust. ‘To explore is my Wish,’ he wrote the following spring, ‘but the Place to which I may be sent almost indifferent to me, whether the Sources of the Nile, or the South Pole are to be visited, I am equally ready to embark on the undertaking.’79 In summer 1772 Cook was commissioned by the Admiralty to undertake a second, much larger Pacific expedition, this time with several ships.

…

Besides expressing his gratitude and his determination to do ‘something for the public good’, he included an interesting tour d’horizon of scientific developments as he saw them in January 1801. While public affairs, economic hardship and the war with France filled him with ‘confusion’ and dismay, the immense possibilities of scientific research had never looked brighter. The cowpox inoculation, pioneered by Dr Edward Jenner, was becoming general ‘not in England alone, but over the whole of Europe’, and promised to annihilate smallpox. Galvanism held out immense possibilities, and ‘promises to unfold some of the laws of our nature’. Even the Pneumatic Institution, ‘in spite of the political odium attached to its founder’, might yet cure some ‘obstinate diseases’.

…

The journals of Joseph Banks and his colleagues in the South Seas, of Gilbert White in Hampshire, of Coleridge in Somerset, of Dorothy Wordsworth in the Lake District, all demonstrate this (almost sacred) attention to things simply and precisely observed. William Herschel wrote a brilliant paper on the nature of objective observation, and its particular problems in astronomy. Goethe wrote another in 1798 on the general problems of subjectivity, ‘Empirical Observation and Science’. In 1788 Edward Jenner published a chilling paper in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions on observing the murderous activity of a baby cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest. Jenner’s quiet, meticulous description of the baby cuckoo (while still blind) relentlessly wheelbarrowing its smaller ‘rival’ sparrow chick backwards, between its half-formed wings, up the side of the nest until it was thrown out, has all the power of a moral allegory, but remains completely objective in tone.

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

We have come to depend on our microbes, and without them, we would be a mere fraction of our true selves. So what does it mean to be just 10 per cent human? ONE Twenty-First-Century Sickness In September 1978, Janet Parker became the last person on Earth to die of smallpox. Just 70 miles from the place where Edward Jenner had first vaccinated a young boy against the disease with cowpox pus from a milkmaid, 180 years earlier, Parker’s body played host to the virus in its final outing in human flesh. Her job as a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham in the UK would not have put her in direct jeopardy were it not for the proximity of her dark room to the laboratory beneath.

…

Medical innovations and public health measures – largely those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – have made a profound difference to life as a human. Four developments in particular have taken us from a two-generation society to a four-, or even five-generation society in just one, long, lifetime. The first and earliest of these, courtesy of Edward Jenner and a cow named Blossom, is, of course, vaccination. Jenner knew that milkmaids were protected from developing smallpox by virtue of having been infected by the much milder cowpox. He thought it possible that the pus from a milkmaid’s pustules might, if injected into another person, transfer that protection.

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

The groundbreaking understanding of anthrax—a combination of Koch’s spores and Pasteur’s dilutions—was the first to link the German physician with the French chemist. It would not be the last. The next step for Pasteur was the transformation of his experimental results into a practical therapy. A hundred years before, the English physician Edward Jenner had demonstrated that exposing healthy subjects to fluid taken from (relatively benign) cowpox lesions conferred immunity to smallpox. Pasteur himself had discovered that injecting hens with cultures containing chicken cholera that had lost virulence offered the same protection against that disease.

…

* His practice was eventually debunked by an all-star commission appointed by King Louis XVI that included Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin. * It is no coincidence that the Latin root for “patient” is patior: “I am suffering.” * Also, that exposure conferred lifetime immunity, which is why vaccination against smallpox was being practiced in Asia centuries before Edward Jenner’s 1796 inoculation of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps (with lesions containing cowpox—vaccinia—rather than the variola virus that caused smallpox). * Mortality tables aren’t always as accurate as they are precise. A table showing the reasons for 942 recorded deaths by “Diseases and Casualties” in the city of Boston during the year 1811 lists such causes as “drinking cold water” (2 deaths), “sudden death” (25), “white swelling,” and “decay.”

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Dig deep enough in the history of any type of discovery in any field and you’ll find more than one claimant for the first priority. In fact, you are likely to find many parents for each novelty. Sunspots were first discovered not by two but by four separate observers, including Galileo, in the same year, 1611. We know of six different inventors of the thermometer, and three of the hypodermic needle. Edward Jenner was preceded by four other scientists who all independently discovered the efficacy of vaccinations. Adrenaline was “first” isolated four times. Three different geniuses discovered (or invented) decimal fractions. The electric telegraph was reinvented by Joseph Henry, Samuel Morse, William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and Karl Steinheil.

…

The same argument can be made about whole libraries’ worth of knowledge—herbal wisdom, traditional practices, spiritual insights—that are “discovered” by the educated, but only after having been long known by native and folk peoples. These supposed “discoveries” seem imperialistic and condescending—and often are. Yet there is one legitimate way in which we can claim that Columbus discovered America, and the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu discovered gorillas, and Edward Jenner discovered vaccines. They “discovered” previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge. Nowadays we would call that accumulating of structured knowledge science. Until Du Chaillu’s adventures in Gabon any knowledge about gorillas was extremely parochial; the local tribes’ vast natural knowledge about these primates was not integrated into all that science knew about all other animals.

The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations by Thomas Morris

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, New Journalism, parabiotic, placebo effect, popular electronics, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

At a bad-tempered meeting of the governors of St George’s Hospital in London he became involved in a row about student admissions. Unpleasant words were exchanged, and Hunter grew so irate that he rose from the table and walked out. As he entered the next room he turned to a colleague as if to speak to him, groaned, and fell down dead.1 To one of his friends, at least, his death came as no surprise. Edward Jenner, who would later attain everlasting fame by discovering vaccination against smallpox, had realised a decade earlier that Hunter was seriously ill and that his ailment would probably kill him – but decided against raising it on the grounds that ‘it must have brought on an unpleasant conference between Mr Hunter and me’.2 Hunter had himself first noticed worrying symptoms in 1773, and thanks to the meticulous notes he was in the habit of taking about his own health we know what they were.

…

During heavy exercise it consumes four times more than the brain, despite being only a fifth of its weight. Given the vital function of the coronary arteries, any blockage impeding the flow of blood to the heart can clearly have catastrophic consequences. Fothergill’s findings were confirmed shortly afterwards by Edward Jenner during an autopsy on the body of another angina patient: while dissecting the heart his knife struck an object so hard that it damaged the blade. His first thought was that some plaster had fallen from the ceiling, but then he saw that the coronaries had become ‘bony canals’.10 He became convinced that coronary artery disease was the cause of angina pain, but when John Hunter started to suffer the same symptoms Jenner decided against making his theory public.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Between 15 and 45 percent of victims eventually perish—in many cases as a result of septic shock. Smallpox has been one of the world’s greatest killers. Around 3.5 million Aztec Indians died of the disease after it was introduced by Spanish conquistadors. In Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, the disease was killing 400,000 each year. Dr. Edward Jenner introduced smallpox vaccination in 1796, and yet deaths continued worldwide—including that of China’s Tongzhi Emperor, as we saw in Chapter 5. Over the course of the twentieth century, smallpox was still responsible for a total of between 300 million and 500 million deaths. In 1959, the World Health Assembly adopted the global eradication of smallpox as a goal.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Most experts on early human evolution agree that primitive tools and human brains co-evolved; that the imaginative capacity of the tool-maker was both a product of and a requirement for the development of more effective stone tools and more rapid innovation. Education is, of course, a conscious process of brain modification, and culture is a process of passing such modifications from generation to generation. Edward Jenner started modifying immune systems with cowpox pus in 1796, and the more dangerous practice of variolating with smallpox In the Cause-and-Effect Zone 17 pus had apparently been used in China since about 1000 A.D. The rise of the printing press and the widespread distribution of printed vernacular texts created an unprecedented and farflung cognitive and information network, one that had profound culturally transforming impacts (later amplified by the rise of telegraph and telephone networks).

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

After the British royal family was variolated in 1721, the practice spread rapidly and soon ordinary people were also inoculated.13 An eight-year-old boy was variolated with smallpox in Berkeley, Gloucestershire in 1757, and only developed a mild case of smallpox, and immunity which saved his life from later epidemics. His name was Edward Jenner. He would devote his life to finding a better and safer response. He had heard tales that dairymaids were protected after they had suffered from cowpox, and started to inoculate people with it to make them immune from smallpox. The Latin word for cow is vacca, and vaccinus means of or from a cow, so Jenner called his new procedure ‘vaccination’.

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. Semmelweis himself came closer than most to the truth, thinking it involved transfer of minute particles of corpses when doctors did autopsies and then did not wash their hands before treating patients.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

In practice, this was an age in which these things mattered a great deal, and they mattered more than most citizens of the Republic of Letters would have liked to admit.16 The Republic of Letters was a transnational institution, but one that had to exist in a political reality. Many of those defending Newton in his priority dispute with Leibniz did so out of national loyalty, although referring to a kind of “philosophical jingoism” in the early eighteenth century (Shank, 2008, p. 181) seems excessive. Whether the sciences “were never at war” as Edward Jenner famously remarked may still be an open question. The ideals of the Republic Letters, in which Diderot could tell Hume that the latter “belonged to all nations” and would never be asked for his birth certificate (Gay, 1966, p. 13), did not always mesh with the reality on the ground. The eighteenth century after all was not just the age of Enlightenment, it was also an age of mercantilism, and the information made available freely in the Republic of Letters was often gathered to serve the interests of the state—as Bacon had advocated.

…

The Industrial Enlightenment, then, should be understood as a primarily empirical project, with only occasional flashes of analytical insight before the nineteenth century. Yet the collection and analysis of data was obviously of help in many practical applications. The search for empirical regularities in the data, to use a modern term, inspired Edward Jenner to see why some people seemed immune to smallpox. In animal breeding, in which British farmers scored significant advances, empirics was all they had to go by in the absence of any theory of evolution, let alone genetics. In metallurgy and engineering, the individuals doing the inventing on the ground (such as Henry Cort and Richard Trevithick) consulted empirical scientists, such as Joseph Black and Davies Giddy (Gilbert).

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

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. We also owe the wide range of vaccines we now have available to the pioneering thinkers behind the germ theory of disease. Vaccines have a long history. 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.

Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

Don’t Miss... » Diplodocus skeleton » Dinosaur Gallery » Darwin Centre » Earth Galleries » Wildlife Garden Practicalities » Offline map » 7942 5000; www.nhm.ac.uk; Cromwell Rd SW7 » admission free » 10am-5.50pm » » South Kensington Hyde Park to Chelsea Top Sights Apsley HouseF3 Hyde ParkD2 Kensington PalaceA3 Natural History Museum C4 Science MuseumC4 Victoria & Albert Museum C4 Sights 1 Albert MemorialB3 2 Australian War MemorialF3 3 Brompton Oratory C4 4 Carlyle's House D7 5 Chelsea Old Church C7 6 Chelsea Physic Garden E7 7 Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground A2 8 Edward Jenner StatueC1 Elfin Oak (see 7) 9 Holocaust Memorial Garden E3 10 Kings RoadD6 11 Marble Arch E1 12 Michelin HouseD5 13 National Army MuseumE6 14 New Zealand War MemorialF3 Orangery (see 39) 15 Peter Pan Statue C2 16 Princess Diana Memorial FountainC3 17 Queen Elizabeth Gate F3 Royal Albert Hall (see 52) 18 Royal Hospital ChelseaE6 19 Saatchi Gallery E5 20 Serpentine GalleryC3 21 Serpentine Sackler GalleryC2 22 Speakers' Corner E1 23 Tyburn ConventD1 24 Tyburn Tree SiteE1 25 Wellington Arch F3 26 Westminster Cathedral G4 Eating Bibendum (see 12) 27 Byron C7 28 Daquise C5 29 Dinner by Heston BlumenthalE3 30 El PirataF2 31 Galvin at Windows F2 32Gordon RamsayE7 33HachéB7 34 Hunan F6 35 Kazan G5 36 Launceston Place A4 37 Min Jiang A3 38 NobuF2 39 Orangery A2 40 Penny Black B7 41 Pimlico Road Farmers MarketF5 42 Racine D4 43 Rasoi Vineet Bhatia D5 44 Roussillon F6 45 Tom's Kitchen D6 46 Zuma D3 Drinking & Nightlife 47 Drayton Arms B6 48 Nag's Head E3 49 Queen's Arms B4 Entertainment 50 Cadogan Hall E5 51 Ciné Lumière C5 52 Royal Albert Hall B3 53 Royal Court Theatre E5 Shopping 54 Butler & Wilson C5 55 Church's D4 Conran Shop (see 12) 56 HarrodsD4 57 Harvey Nichols E3 58John Sandoe BooksE5 59 Limelight Movie Art C7 60 Lulu Guinness E5 61 Rippon Cheese Stores G5 Sleeping 62 Aster HouseC5 63Astor Hyde ParkB3 64Astor KensingtonA5 65Astor VictoriaH5 66B+B BelgraviaF5 67BlakesB6 68 Cadogan HotelE4 69easyHotel VictoriaG5 70GoreB4 71HalkinF3 72Knightsbridge HotelD4 73LanesboroughF3 74Luna Simone HotelH5 75MeiningerB5 76Number SixteenC5 77San Domenico HouseD5 78Windermere HotelG6 Kensington & Hyde Park Eating | Drinking & Nightlife | Entertainment | Shopping Sights Knightsbridge, Kensington & Hyde Park Victoria & Albert Museum Museum Offline map Google map See Click here.

…

If you have kids, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground Offline map Google map , in the northwest corner of the gardens, has some pretty ambitious attractions for children. Next to the playground is the delightful Elfin Oak Offline map Google map , an ancient tree stump carved with elves, gnomes, witches and small animals. George Frampton’s celebrated Peter Pan statue Offline map Google map is close to the lake. On the opposite side is a statue of Edward Jenner Offline map Google map , who developed a vaccine for smallpox. Top Sights Kensington Palace Built in 1605 the palace became the favourite royal residence under William and Mary of Orange in 1689, and remained so until George III became king and relocated to Buckingham Palace. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Kensington Palace was variously renovated by Sir Christopher Wren and William Kent.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Since smallpox was an exclusively human disease, he argued, it would be easier to eradicate than mosquito-borne infections such as malaria. He pointed to the Soviet Union’s success at eliminating smallpox, despite its vast territory and poor transportation networks. He referenced Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the inventor of the smallpox vaccine, Edward Jenner: “I avail myself of this occasion of rendering you a portion of the tribute of gratitude due to you from the whole human family. Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility. . . . Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you has been extirpated.”

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

Rational therapies, such as diets, baths and herbal medicines, came into practice: salad greens, barley water and milk, for example, were encouraged to replace red meat and wine; others endorsed a blend of aloes, black hellebore and colocynth.7 When the Enlightenment began, a string of discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine–by Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, John Dalton, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and Edward Jenner–pointed towards the possibility of physical explanations for mental phenomena. The French philosopher René Descartes thought that experiences make tiny pores in the brain like needles making a pattern of holes in a linen cloth.8 David Hartley, the eighteenth-century English physician, claimed that nerve vibrations create sensations and memory, and that violent vibrations are the cause of mental illness.9 These ideas were vague and incomplete, but they were free of mysticism and the supernatural.

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

This process of using animal products in medicine is called “zootherapy,” but it’s no trip to the zoo. Occasionally, animal research has led to significant, even crucial, discoveries. The fruit fly played a critical role in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s early studies of genetics, Ivan Pavlov demonstrated the relationship between sense stimulation and body functions with his dogs, and Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine from cows (and promptly coined the term vaccination from the Latin vacca for “cow”). We’ve also employed animals to aid our own healing processes: Leeches, for example (see Leeches, page 211), were for many years considered an important weapon in the medicinal arsenal, snails have long been effective at healing burns, spiderwebs can be used to bind a wound, and, even today, maggots are used to clean out wounds.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

So here is the British royalty in 1724 understanding that it is really important to vaccinate your children. It is just amazing to me that you can take this . . . and move to where we are today.” At that, Enriquez stood up to fetch another armful of documents. “These are Jenner’s notebooks on vaccination,” he explained. Edward Jenner is generally credited with having invented the smallpox vaccine, after noting that milkmaids rarely got the disease. He theorized, correctly as it would turn out, that the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected them from smallpox.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

Unfortunately, we in the scientific community don’t know yet how to present data in ways that will reliably persuade people to change their minds. The vaccine wars of today, stirred up most recently by outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles, are nothing new. They are as old as vaccination itself. When Edward Jenner, a brilliant English country doctor, developed the vaccine for smallpox in 1796, he was both praised and mocked, lauded and feared. Religious authorities accused him of playing God, and even the equally bright economist Thomas Malthus lost sleep over the thought that vaccines would lead to unsustainable surges in the number of people on the planet.

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

And we can have some confidence that it will be eradicated. Why such optimism? Consider the worst disease of all time: smallpox. 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.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

.* In 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis decisively proved that hand-washing by doctors would cut the incidence of puerperal fever, a condition that could be fatal during childbirth, he was spurned. All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.* I had always innocently assumed that after Edward Jenner discovered a vaccination against smallpox he would have presented his findings before sitting back to enjoy the acclaim. The truth was nothing of the kind; he spent the rest of his life defending his idea against a large number of people who had profited from an earlier practice called variolation, and were reluctant to admit that anything else was better.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But no matter how quickly we make a new vaccine during an outbreak, it won’t do any good if it takes years to get through the approval process. So let’s look in detail at how that process works, and how we might accelerate it without sacrificing safety or effectiveness. * * * — Humans invented vaccines long before they invented ways to make sure they worked. The British physician Edward Jenner is considered the founder of modern vaccines, having shown in the late eighteenth century that inoculating a young boy with cowpox—a disease related to smallpox, but with mild health effects—made him immune to smallpox too.[*5] The word vaccine comes from the name of the cowpox virus, vaccinia, which in turn is derived from vacca, the Latin word for cow.

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

They belonged to observant individuals who had noticed two things: that school-age children were not the primary targets of this particular flu, and that even when they did fall sick, it wasn’t clear where they had caught the disease–at home, at school, or somewhere in between. If it wasn’t school, then closing the schools would neither protect the children nor stop the spread. The most heated discussions of all, however, revolved around vaccination. Vaccination was older than germ theory–Edward Jenner had successfully vaccinated a boy against cowpox in 1796–so it was undeniably possible to create an effective vaccine without knowing the identity of the microbe to which you were eliciting an immune response. Pasteur had, after all, created a vaccine against rabies without knowing that rabies was caused by a virus.

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.

…

The disease that got its name from the painful pustules that cover the victim’s skin, mouth, and eyes and that killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century has ceased to exist. (The last case was diagnosed in Somalia in 1977.) For this astounding moral triumph we can thank, among others, Edward Jenner, who discovered vaccination in 1796, the World Health Organization, which in 1959 set the audacious goal of eradicating the disease, and William Foege, who figured out that vaccinating small but strategically chosen portions of the vulnerable populations would do the job. In Getting Better, the economist Charles Kenny comments: The total cost of the program over those ten years . . . was in the region of $312 million—perhaps 32 cents per person in infected countries.

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Such a study would examine the effects of ripping up concrete and putting in trees and weigh them against the cost in dollars. The analysis might show that the landscape change is a bargain for a city. Scientists often get their ideas when they realize that some observation they’ve made constitutes a natural experiment. The eighteenth-century physician Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids rarely got smallpox, a disease related to the cowpox to which the milkmaids would have been exposed. Maybe milkmaids were less likely to get smallpox than butter churners because cowpox somehow protected against smallpox. Jenner found a young milkmaid with cowpox on her hand and inoculated an eight-year-old boy with some material from it.

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. And in an article from Scientific American in 1888 you can find the very same arguments which modern antivaccination campaigners continue to use today: The success of the anti-vaccinationists has been aptly shown by the results in Zurich, Switzerland, where for a number of years, until 1883, a compulsory vaccination law obtained, and smallpox was wholly prevented—not a single case occurred in 1882.

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Jenner, future of work, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork

Some fretted that Jesty’s needlework would turn his family into “horned beasts.” Eventually the Jesty clan was forced to flee for the Isle of Purbeck on the English Channel.3 Word spread about Jesty’s inoculations (and how the family remained hornless), and British doctors began attempting similar procedures. In 1796, a physician named Edward Jenner exposed an eight-year-old boy to cowpox; when Jenner later infected the boy with smallpox, the cowpox protected him from the disease without signs of even localized inflammation or infection. Jenner inoculated others as well. Unlike Jesty, Jenner evaluated his subjects, analyzed their results using proper scientific methods, and published his findings.

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

The inhabitants of towns and villages would often escape the disease for many years, but would have no immunity during an epidemic, and large numbers of both children and adults died. In Sweden in 1750, 15 percent of all deaths were due to smallpox. In London in 1740, there were 140 smallpox burials—mostly of children—for every 1,000 baptisms in the city. Variolation is not the same as vaccination, which was developed by Edward Jenner only in 1799, was widely and rapidly adopted thereafter, and is credited with major reductions in mortality. Variolation was an ancient technique, practiced in China and India for more than a thousand years, and also long established in Africa. Material was extracted from the pustules of someone suffering from smallpox and scratched into the arm of the person to be protected; in the African and Asian versions, dried scabs were blown into the nose.

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

Roosevelt, who was crippled by polio (although more recent scholarship suggests he may have been misdiagnosed, and that he actually had contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome). Millions of dimes, many of them contributed by schoolchildren, established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and led to FDR’s profile being put on the dime. Since 1796, when Edward Jenner created the first vaccine, for smallpox, the field of public health has been dogged by anti-vaccination movements. They are sometimes inspired by moral or religious sentiments, citing the use of animals or fetal tissue; or they may be swayed by political notions of individual liberty; but the main argument is the threat of disease caused by the vaccine itself.

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

The new chickens died; but the chickens previously injected with the old culture once again survived. Why would those chickens – against all reasonable expectations – live on? Upon hearing the news Pasteur fell silent, then ‘exclaimed as if he had a vision “Don't you see, these birds have been vaccinated!”’ 1 Vaccination had been known of since at least the late eighteenth century, when Edward Jenner realised that cowpox could create immunity to smallpox, a devastating killer.2 But until Pasteur no one had generalised from there to form a foundational medical principle. He saw the link between his spoilt culture, cowpox and immunity. Despite everyone knowing about vaccination, it was only he, at this moment, who made the decisive breakthrough.

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

All viruses are parasites in that they need a host to live, but not all parasites are microscopic viruses. 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.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

They build, run, and manage institutions. They adapt, announce, and enforce policies. They set up, control, and administer systems. But, as essential as they are, implementers are rarely appreciated. Recognition goes to individual leaders such as Yunus rather than to frontline Grameen Bank employees. Or to Edward Jenner, who identified the smallpox vaccine, rather than to the health workers who administered the doses. Or to Wael Ghonim, who started a Facebook page, rather than to the nameless protesters in Tahrir Square. We could hardly tell the stories of interventions if we had to name every responsible party, but by overlooking implementers, we take good implementation for granted.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

This is old technology. Cowpox is a disease that usually infects cows, but it can sometimes infect humans too, giving them a mild disease that resembles smallpox (although smallpox is much deadlier). Noting the folk wisdom that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, on May 14, 1796, English physician Edward Jenner conducted an experiment. He scraped some pus from cowpox blisters on the hands of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and then injected it into James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener (he conveniently overlooked the option of trying out the procedure on his own children). Jenner inoculated Phipps in both arms, and Phipps developed a fever and felt sick.

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

Without the love of oceanside living, shore erosion yes, but no social disruption. Even more promising than diversification and dematerialization is an attitude that has not yet found its rightful name. It is the substitution of cunning for the frontal attack, and it is not new. It began with immunization against smallpox—as we have seen, a folk practice long before Edward Jenner introduced it to medicine—and continued with the vaccines of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finesse means abandoning frontal attacks for solutions that rely on the same kind of latent properties that led to revenge effects in the first place. Sometimes it means ceasing to suppress a symptom.

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

I’ll spare you the ensuing back-and-forth, which is as bitter and rancorous, and as impenetrable, as most academic controversies, and which continues more than fifteen years later. It’s not that it hasn’t been entertaining, at least at points, as when Biederman was moved to liken his critics to people who insist the earth is flat and circled by the sun, and his own discovery to that of Edward Jenner, whose “smallpox vaccine was ridiculed10 when initially proposed”—suggestive comparisons for a man studying a disorder with grandiosity among its symptoms. It also illustrates the bruising politics behind the DSM, the way in which changing it is as much a legislative as a scientific process, and the self-validating nature of diagnosis, by which once you’ve created a diagnostic category, the fact that people fit into it becomes evidence that the disorder exists.

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

As the English economist and scientistinventor William Petty observed in 1679: when a new invention is first propounded, in the beginning every man objects, and the poor inventor runs the gantloop of all petulant wits […] not one of a hundred outlives this torture […] and moreover, this commonly is so long a doing that the poor inventor is either dead or disabled by the debts contracted to pursue his design.17 The smallpox vaccine at first seemed impossible – the Royal Society told its inventor Edward Jenner in 1798 ‘not to risk his reputation by presenting to this learned body anything which appeared so much at variance with established knowledge and withal so incredible’. Since the source of the vaccine was infected cows, it was also stupid: clergy objected to the ‘iniquity of transferring disease from the beasts of the field to Man’.

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

Medical intervention was also important, for example the widespread campaign to promote breastfeeding, the clearing of swamps (reducing the incidence of malaria, common throughout southern Europe and all the way up into the Rhine valley), and the improvement of public hygiene, at least in major European capital cities. The decline of smallpox, a major killer before the development of effective vaccination by Edward Jenner in 1798, also played a role, as did the relative absence of wars in Europe after the Battle of Waterloo. Birth rates also began to rise as a result of women marrying younger, increasing the excess of births over deaths that created population growth. The annual percentage rate of population growth was striking.

…

The practice of preventing the disease by scratching the skin with an infected needle, developed early on in China, was introduced to Europe via the Ottoman Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Its treatment was revolutionized at the end of the century, in 1798, by an English country doctor, Edward Jenner (1749–1823), who noticed that milkmaids never caught smallpox, and concluded that the reason for their immunity was because they had already caught a related disease, cowpox, which did not pose any threat to humans. Jenner’s new preventive treatment, which he called vaccination, after the Latin for ‘cow’, soon became widely practised.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

The system, which became operational in 1991, was effectively a catalog of catalogs that enabled a user to drill down and examine the contents of gopher databases maintained by hundreds of different institutions. All of these systems treated documents as individual entities, rather like books in a library. For example, when a system located a document about smallpox vaccine, say, it might tell the user that its inventor was Edward Jenner; in order to discover more about Jenner, the user would need to search again. The inventors of hypertext—Vannevar Bush in the 1940s and Engelbart and Nelson in the 1960s—had envisaged a system that would enable one to informally skip from document to document. At the press of button, as it were, one could leap from smallpox to Jenner to The Chantry in Gloucestershire, England (the house where Jenner lived and now a museum to his memory).

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Here are the men who made canals (Thomas Telford), tunnels (Marc Brunel), steam engines (James Watt), locomotives (Richard Trevithick), rockets (William Congreve), hydraulic presses (Joseph Bramah); men who invented the machine tool (Henry Maudslay), the power loom (Edmund Cartwright), the factory (Matthew Boulton), the miner’s lamp (Humphry Davy) and the smallpox vaccine (Edward Jenner). Here are astronomers like Nevil Maskelyne and William Herschel, physicists like Henry Cavendish and Count Rumford, chemists like John Dalton and William Henry, botanists like Joseph Banks, polymaths like Thomas Young, and many more. You look at such a picture and wonder, ‘How did any one country have so much talent in the same place?’

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

Just by washing up before surgery, we have profoundly improved the rates at which patients survive. Once we understood what the problem was, it was an easy problem to solve. For goodness’ sake, we solved it with soap. The idea of vaccines would also have sounded crazy to most people before the English physician Edward Jenner successfully used fluid he had gathered from a cowpox blister to inoculate an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps in what today would be an egregiously unethical experiment but at the time sparked a new era in immunological medicine. Indeed, the idea of giving a patient a little bit of a disease in order to prevent a lot of disease would have been seen as insane—even potentially homicidal—to many people until Jenner did it in 1796.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

He would have seen The Manor of Huddersfield Enclosure Act of 1785 had brought the law home, which meant it would be enforced in his youth. 22. “For two centuries” Description of the root causes of inequality in England from Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 2. 23. A vaccine was discovered Edward Jenner discovered the vaccine in 1796, and it was first made available two years later, and widely to the public soon after. 24. “the emergence of class differences” Romola Jane Davenport, Max Satchell, and Leigh Matthew William Shaw-Taylor, “The Geography of Smallpox in England before Vaccination: A Conundrum Resolved,” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 206 (June 2018), 75–85. 25.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

The Hunters were bona fide figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith both attended William’s lectures in the 1770s; John diagnosed David Hume’s fatal illness, and treated Smith for hemorrhoids. He passed on his great motto, “Don’t think, try,” to his most famous English student, Edward Jenner. It probably helped to inspire Jenner’s experiments with using cowpox inoculations to fight off its far deadlier relative, smallpox. Jenner gets the credit for inventing medical inoculation—although it was in fact another distinguished Scottish London physician, Charles Maitland, who first borrowed the technique from the Middle East and used it to protect his patients from smallpox outbreaks in the 1720s.

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

Occasionally, it contracted dramatically, such as during the Black Plague, which killed off an estimated one-fourth of humanity in the mid-fourteenth century. 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.

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

Ross was knighted, he was given the directorship of a scientific institute named after him, he collected scientific honors like they were vintage Pez dispensers, but the hole was never filled. He spent years, though under no financial strain, publicly campaigning for Parliament to award him a monetary prize for his contribution to public health. Edward Jenner had gotten one in 1807 for developing the smallpox vaccine, and Ross felt he deserved no less. Possibly his lifelong peevishness stemmed from a lurking feeling he wasn’t following his true life’s path. Astonishingly for a doctor so distinguished, Ross says he entered the medical profession “merely and purely as a duty,” putting aside the two pursuits that truly sang to his heart.

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

That substance could be a deactivated version of the virus or a safe fragment of the virus or genetic instructions to make that fragment. This is intended to kick the person’s immune system into gear. When it works, the body produces antibodies that will, sometimes for many years, fend off any infection if the real virus ever attacks. Vaccinations were pioneered in the 1790s by an English doctor named Edward Jenner who noticed that many milkmaids were immune to smallpox. They had all been infected by a form of pox that afflicts cows but is harmless to humans, and Jenner surmised that the cowpox had given the milkmaids immunity to smallpox. So he took some pus from a cowpox blister, rubbed it into scratches he made in the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, and then (this was in the days before bioethics panels) exposed the kid to smallpox.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Edwards, thank you for my life.”37 JK listed Edwards among his medical role models, along with the time it had taken for them to be duly recognized, in a PowerPoint presentation that he showed to his lab:38 Christiaan Barnard: Domestic, 3 weeks, International, 1 Year Robert Edwards: 7 years Edward Jenner: 1 year. Drawing encouragement from these examples of scientific trailblazers, JK imagined his own future reflected in their image: initially controversial perhaps, but ultimately celebrated as having been in the vanguard. It was all about having the courage to take a controversial first step—breaking the glass—and thereby pushing science and humanity forward.

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

David Hume, after this demonstration and following Locke, led a movement of “empiricism.” His contemporary John Hunter made a brilliant scientific study of surgery, elevating it from a barber’s craft. Hunter also performed model scientific experiments, including some on himself—as when he infected himself with pus from a gonorrheal case to prove a hypothesis. Then in 1798 Edward Jenner, a student of Hunter’s—Hunter had told him “Don’t think. Try.”—published his work. As a young medical student Jenner had heard a milkmaid say, “I cannot take the smallpox because I have had cowpox.” The cowpox virus resembles smallpox so closely that exposure to cowpox gives immunity to smallpox.

Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

If you have kids, visit the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, in the northwest corner of the gardens, which has some pretty ambitious attractions for children including tepees and a pirate ship. Art is also characteristic of these gardens. George Frampton’s celebrated Peter Pan statue is close to the lake. On the opposite side is a statue of Edward Jenner, who developed a vaccine for smallpox. To the west of the Serpentine is a sculpture of John Hanning Speke, the explorer who discovered the Nile. SERPENTINE GALLERY Map 7402 6075, recorded information 7298 1515; www.serpentinegallery.org; Kensington Gardens W2; admission free; 10am-6pm; Knightsbridge; What looks like an unprepossessing 1930s-style tearoom in the midst of the leafy Kensington Gardens is one of London’s most important contemporary art galleries.

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

“Show me almost any new infectious disease,” said the executive director of the Consortium of Conservation Medicine, “and I’ll show you an environmental change brought about by humans that either caused or exacerbated it.”923 To quote the comic-strip character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”924 Two centuries ago, Edward Jenner, the founder of modern vaccines, proposed that the “deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved him a prolific source of diseases.”925 This observation dates back to the second century, when Plutarch argued that new classes of diseases followed profound changes in the way we live.926 The same can be said for animals.

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

north side: Tottenham Court Road to Bloomsbury Street No. 106 When the Second World War Home Guard refused to allow women to join their ranks, even though they were teaching male recruits to fire guns, fifty women, including Marjorie Foster, a winner of the King’s Prize for shooting, met here and formed the Amazon Defence Corps. Before long similar units had been set up across Britain. No. 62 The Bloomsbury Dispensary opened at this address in 1801 and employed as Superintendent of Inoculation Edward Jenner, who conducted pioneering work into vaccination, carrying out more than 800 inoculations over a ten-year period and treating all the children at the nearby Foundlings Hospital. No. 59 The travel pioneer Thomas Cook opened his first London office at this address in 1862. As the lease forbade him to advertise the business, he named the premises Cook’s British Museum Boarding House.

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

The deliberately induced epidemic quickly spread to the northwest, claiming large numbers of Sioux and Plains Indians, crossed the Rookies and inflicted huge death tolls among Native Americans from southern California all the way north to the Arctic Circle tribes of Alaska. This devastation was cited in the official WHO history of smallpox: Fenner, Henderson, Arita, et al., (1988), op. cit. 24 Fenner, Henderson, Arita, et al. (1988), op. cit. 25 English physician Edward Jenner discovered in 1796 that cowpox, which was harmless to people, could be used as a vaccine against smallpox. The riskier idea of inoculating people with small amounts of human smallpox to raise immunity goes back in some cultures to ancient times, although some people developed the disease after injection.

England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

You can also visit the castle’s state rooms, as well as the medieval Great Hall, Picture Gallery and kitchen. Regular jousting events and medieval banquets are held here in summer. Berkeley is also home to the Jenner Museum (01453-810631; www.jennermuseum.com; Church Lane; adult/under 18yr £4.25/2.50; 12.30-5.30pm Tue-Sat, 1-5.30pm Sun Apr-Oct), which honours the life and works of Edward Jenner, country doctor and pioneer of vaccination. The museum is in the beautiful Queen Anne house, where the doctor performed the first smallpox vaccination in 1796. To get to the museum on foot, follow the path from the castle through St Mary’s churchyard. Bus 207 does the route between Berkeley and Gloucester (40 minutes, daily Monday to Saturday).