Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- We admire people who make a big show of their altruism, but some of the most praiseworthy accomplishments occur outside popular attention.
- This Thanksgiving, we give thanks to seven scientists who made the world a safer, healthier place to live.
- While there is still a lot of progress to make, the combination of science and humanism continues to improve the world and our lot in it at an unprecedented scale.
“Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug?” asks psychologist Steven Pinker in his article “The Moral Instinct.”
Most people answer Mother Teresa. She won of the Nobel Peace Prize, was canonized by the Catholic Church, and raised millions of dollars to run her missions for the poor. Bill Gates is best known for being a billionaire who earned his riches through selfish, Scroogian capitalism. And Norman Borlaug is…the answer to a daunting trivia question?
Not so fast, writes Pinker. Mother Teresa enjoyed good moral PR, but her million-dollar missions substituted modern medical procedures and palliative care for prayer and “extoll[ing] the virtues of suffering.” Meanwhile, Bill Gates co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity that has saved or improved the lives of more than 100 million people by developing strategies to fight poor health and infectious diseases in the world’s poorest communities.
As for Norman Borlaug, he potentially saved more lives than any other person in history (more on him later).
Pinker’s question reminds us that while we benefit immensely from science, our admiration for its practitioners is disproportionate to the progress they’ve made possible. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we’ve chosen to highlight seven scientists whose accomplishments made our pale blue dot a better place to be, and for whom we are immensely grateful.
Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin
(Photo from Flickr)
Jonas Salk developed one of the first polio vaccines a few years after the U.S. suffered its worst polio epidemic.
Polio is a debilitating, infectious disease that destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. It can paralyze parts of the body, and should it strike the muscles used for breathing, the result is a drawn-out death. If the symptoms alone weren’t heartbreaking enough, the disease is predominately contracted by children.
But polio may one day be little more than a footnote in history thanks to virologist Jonas Salk.
Salk developed one of the first polio vaccines while working as the head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. To prove its efficacy, he tested the vaccine on volunteers, including himself. It worked, yet despite creating a modern miracle, Salk refused to patent or monetize it. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” he said during a famous TV broadcast.
Soon after, Albert Sabin introduced an improved vaccine that could be administered orally and protected the digestive tract to prevent the spread of the disease more efficiently.
Their vaccines came at the perfect time. The United States endured devastating epidemics of polio throughout the first half of the 20th century. The year 1952, three years before Salk released his vaccine, saw a frightening increase in the disease’s prevalence, with 57,879 cases and 3,145 deaths.
Today the U.S. is polio free, and cases have fallen worldwide — from 350,000 in 1988 to 407 in 2013, a more than 99 percent decline resulting in 80 percent of the world’s population living in polio-free regions.
Shout outs are also due to John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Fredrick Chapman Robbins, whose work cultivating the poliomyelitis virus was launched Salk’s research. And no discussion of vaccination would be complete without mention of Edward Jenner, the founder of vaccinology, who inoculated an 8-year-old boy against smallpox in 1796, another virulent disease the world is better without.
Abel Wolman and Linn Enslow
(Photo from John Hopkins University)
Abel Wolman, along with Linn Enslow, developed a formula to use chlorine to sanitize water.
For much of human history, access to potable water proved a major hurdle to our survival. Diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid spread through water contaminated by practices like open defecation and poor waste management. Until the development of germ theory, civilizations were at a loss for a reliable explanation as to how these diseases spread, and cases like the Flint Water Crisis remind us how many of us take access to safe water for guaranteed.
If you’re one of the millions of people with safe drinking water spilling from your tap, you have Abel Wolman to thank. He designed procedures for water sewage chlorination and disinfection, and alongside chemist Linn Enslow, developed a formula to use chlorine to…
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