The Overflowing Inkwell > Recent Status Updates

I've heard my whole life that Henry Ford was the inventor of the assembly-line factory. But "it was not Henry Ford but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who developed the assembly-line technique that continues to symbolize the rationalized organization of work." As a young man Ford visited the stock yards in Chicago, the largest slaughterhouse in the world, and adapted what they were already doing to build cars.

I knew I would cry, reading this book; somehow I didn't think it would be this early.

Found this quote today. Definitely needed it.
"They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving." --Rebecca Solnit

"There is lots of chatter about President Trump serving as an enabler of this America neo-anti-vaccine movement, but I don't feel we have the evidence yet to make such statements."
That didn't age well. 😭😭

Just heard about Florida wanting to suspend all vaccine mandates for children. I hate people, and I hate these guys who started it all by fabricating evidence for it; that the people today willfully use those proven lies to make horrifically wrong decisions for innocent kids who are going to suffer directly from this misinformation. Everyone should have a history of vaccines course in their school career. God.

This book is excellent for low blood pressure.

?!??!?!?!?! No! Blood is NEVER BLUE. NOT EVER. Not even for a split second, omg. "Blood carrying oxygen in arteries is bright red; without oxygen in veins it is blue." NOPE. Cyanosis occurs, sure, and victims look blue, because yes, they are not able to transfer oxygen to the blood. But that is an appearance of the skin, not an actual color of the blood. 🫨🫨🫨

"...[Carrel] kept part of a chicken heart alive for 32 years..."
This was debunked with the discovery of the Hayflick Limit: the number of times noncancerous, healthy cells can divide before they die. The heart in question was only cells from that heart, regularly bathed in medium contaminated with new heart cells that replenished stock & gave the appearance of immortality, though they didn't realize it at the time.

Next time someone bewails the current dismal state of academics & literacy, tell them that in 1869, when the new Harvard president wanted to institute written examinations for medical degrees, the professor of surgery complained to the board that such exams were beyond the reach of students ("More than half of them can barely write.") & you could fail four out of nine total courses and still get your M.D.!

"In the 1820s, two hundred years AFTER the discovery of thermometers, French clinicians began using them [to treat patients]."

How are we even alive, guys.

This pharmaceutical company named itself Gilead and it's freaking me out 😅😅

Ivory tower strikes again. The world does not need prettified, "more inclusive definitions" of freaking viruses, my guy. Refusing to use "genetic parasite" (factually true) in favor of the dressed up phrase "obligate symbiont" is completely pointless--as the author pointed out himself, everything on our planet is an obligate symbiont. Nothing lives completely independently. He wants the opposite of a definition.

"...[V]iruses have contributed in vitally important ways to the evolving genomes of their hosts, and to the ecological cycles of host survival and death." Yeah, and so have landslides.

Rosy glasses 2.0: playing permanent host to EBV virus when it is latent in our B-lymphocyte cells is a good thing according to the author, since you can never be re-infected with EBV. Uh....

"Let us remind ourselves that viruses are not sentient--they do not think ahead and plan a course of action."
'Sentient' means the ability to FEEL (physical sensations, like hot, cold, pain, etc., and/or emotional, such as fear or joy)--sense perception. Sentient **does not** mean the ability to plan ahead or think about the future.

Rosy glasses are FIRMLY in place.
"Parents will be familiar with the anxiety that comes with childhood rashes and fevers...That worry, is perhaps, a residuum of a fear from times only recently gone by when unpleasant things really did happen in the dark of night...How fortunate we are now that our families are protected by antibiotics/vaccines/antivirals"--as if nowadays no child ever dies of these illnesses????

The quote heading the chapter incorrectly (and amusingly) states that "The principle of medical and surgical *mortality*, therefore, consists in never performing on man an experiment which might be harmful to him to any extent..." though it should say "morality" rather than "mortality" lol

This book is jumping around too much for me. The description focuses entirely on rubella, but when you start reading it seems more to be a life history of Hayflick, then it morphs into a history of the Wistar Institute, then of Koprowski and how he managed that Institute, now it's back to being anyone connected at all to the Wistar, and we've spent more time talking about polio and rabies than rubella.

Again, the inconsistency: the author is appalled that safety tests for WI-38 cells were performed on dying cancer patients in a hospital ward, but discouraging abortion after the pregnant mother may have contracted rubella (in a time before accurate testing) is morally unacceptable. Abortion is very clearly seen as the correct option by the author. It's just this weird dichotomy?

Again, befuddling why this is shady. Actively perishing cancer patients in hospital being given embryonic cells to test if the cells could cause cancer is bad just because, I guess??? The author seems to think that the aborted fetuses had it coming, but cancer patients can't possibly give meaningful consent? Henrietta Lacks deserved oodles of compensation but not the fetuses' mothers? I'm just not getting it.

More pearl-clutching & I don't see why? There is nothing in the account here that indicates Koprowski was underhanded in dealing with the parents or going behind their backs; if there were, the author should have included it. As it is, the account states that he asked the parents of the institutionalized children before administering a vaccine he himself had also ingested. Why is this considered shady?

Little too much pearl-clutching happening for my liking....

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"I wish this story were...more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape." Yeah, hen, me too.

rutting salmon? tf?

Well, now I dislike Luke even more now.

so much purple prose 😖😖😖

I like this Robin Carhart-Harris guy. ""While he holds...that psychedelics throw open the doors of perception, he does not agree that everything that comes through that opening...is necessarily real. 'The psychedelic experience can yield a lot of fool's gold.'"

Oh buddy. Nope. He describes how different species are able to detect different things about their environments, such as how bees feel electromagnetic fields with their hairs on their legs & can see ultraviolet markings on petals then he says "You quickly realize there is no single reality out there waiting to be faithfully and comprehensively transcribed." What?!?!