Lucas

“To continue the debate, Egan has responded directly to interview questions about his approach to characterization: There's a preconception in some circles that the characters in realistic fiction ought to have a certain quota of relationship problems, family issues and emotional baggage of various kinds—and some people seem literally unable to believe that a real human being can be more passionate about scientific ideas than anything else, even though the history of science is littered with people for whom that was true. I write about characters for whom the events of whatever story I'm telling are among the most important things in their lives, and there's not much point writing about science through the eyes of someone who'd rather be down the pub. (“Interview: Virtual Worlds”)”
― Karen Burnham, Greg Egan

“To give Kahneman his due, he later admitted that he’d made a mistake in overemphasising the scientific certainty of priming effects. ‘The experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it,’ he commented six years after the publication of Thinking, Fast and Slow. ‘This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm … but I did not think it through.’14 But the damage had already been done: millions of people had been informed by a Nobel Laureate that they had ‘no choice’ but to believe in those studies.”
― Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

“A highly regarded infectious-disease epidemiologist named Donald S. Burke, presently dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, gave a lecture (later published) back in 1997 in which he listed the criteria that might implicate certain kinds of viruses as likeliest candidates to cause a new pandemic. “The first criterion is the most obvious: recent pandemics in human history,” Burke told his audience. That would point to the orthomyxoviruses (including the influenzas) and the retroviruses (including the HIVs), among others. “The second criterion is proven ability to cause major epidemics in non-human animal populations.” This would again spotlight the orthomyxoviruses, but also the family of paramyxoviruses, such as Hendra and Nipah, and the coronaviruses, such as that virus later known as SARS-CoV. Burke’s third criterion was “intrinsic evolvability,” meaning readiness to mutate and to recombine (or reassort), which “confers on a virus the potential to emerge into and to cause pandemics in human populations.” As examples he returned to retroviruses, orthomyxoviruses, and coronaviruses. “Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.” It’s interesting in retrospect to note that he had augured the SARS epidemic six years before it occurred. Much more recently, Burke told me: “I made a lucky guess.” He laughed a self-deprecating hoot and then added that “prediction is too strong a word” for what he had been doing.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“This tense situation exploded early one January morning in 1917 when a group of Mexican women mounted an angry revolt against the immigration officials stationed along the El Paso, Texas–Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, border. They earned their living by day cooking and cleaning in the homes of well-to-do Texans, and each night returned to their homes in Ciudad Juárez. But this particular morning, instead of quietly waiting to cross the border so that they could begin their workdays, the women became enraged over a newly established quarantine against the possible entry of typhus fever. The ironclad measure was established by edict of the surgeon general of the United States. It applied to every Mexican— both immigrants and dayworkers each time they crossed the border into the United States—and included physical examinations, mandatory disinfection of all baggage and personal belongings, and delousing baths with a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, and vinegar. Most intolerable to the Mexicans was the inherent danger of bathing in flammable and noxious agents like gasoline and kerosene. Only nine months earlier, a group of twenty-six Mexicans incarcerated in the El Paso jail underwent a similar disinfection procedure and, soon after a newly arrived prisoner lit a cigarette, were burned to death. While this practice offended and frightened those who were to be subjected to the baths, its dangerous nature seemed to be all but lost on the Americans ordering them.”
― Howard Markel, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed