[HN Gopher] Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89
___________________________________________________________________
Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89
Author : CrossVR
Score : 295 points
Date : 2026-01-28 10:03 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| kwhat4 wrote:
| Just in time to roll over in his grave.
| sowbug wrote:
| And to see himself become the villain.
| junon wrote:
| Yeah how dare he... helps eradicate diseases!
| sowbug wrote:
| At least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek,
| the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an
| impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in
| public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and
| gone full Two-Face.
|
| (https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-
| harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
| quesera wrote:
| Smallpox is not measles! But, point taken.
| olivia-banks wrote:
| Paywall-free link: https://archive.today/Toq4Y
| m-hodges wrote:
| I don't think many people know about or remember the 2003
| smallpox vaccination campaign.1
|
| > The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who
| would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams
| and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily
| vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by
| half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The
| first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Nobody in Hn type circles wants to remember it because looking
| back with hindsight it was clearly just part of the theater to
| get people wringing their hands about whatever chemical or
| biological WMDs they alleged Saddam had and they killed the
| program as so as they got their invasion.
|
| Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:
|
| "The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257
| civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several
| hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live
| virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the
| risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were
| reported by the CDC."
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained",
| not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then,
| why do we still need the vaccine?"
| yen223 wrote:
| Most people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox
| anymore
| quesera wrote:
| We don't vaccinate against smallpox, but keep in mind that at
| least two countries maintain live smallpox virus in government
| labs.
|
| The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two
| others are lying.
| dgacmu wrote:
| It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've
| truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox
| in the wild, period.
|
| The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the
| labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to
| keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets
| vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit
| ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills
| ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation
| vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
|
| (There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being
| developed that have an even better safety profile but we still
| wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the
| side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness
| outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't
| need protection against.)
| saalweachter wrote:
| Actually, do we need to keep samples anymore?
|
| mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any
| need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.
|
| We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be
| ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could
| thirty years ago.
|
| We couldn't _validate_ new vaccines without access to the
| live virus, but then, if we aren 't willing to expose
| hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate,
| we weren't really validating it anyway.
|
| But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and
| destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security
| standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if
| the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old
| strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of
| the new thing in any case.
|
| I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research
| on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not
| sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a
| live virus.
|
| So yeah. Destroy the samples already.
| rolph wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
| ksenzee wrote:
| This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects
| against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the
| CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's got to be one of the greatest legacies in all human
| history. No politician or other empire-builder comes close.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Genghis Khan??
| iwontberude wrote:
| Greatest, not most fucked
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I thought it was clear from my statement about politicians
| and empire builders that I was talking about people who did
| _good, useful_ things.
| adastra22 wrote:
| No? That's not at all obvious.
| lmz wrote:
| Genghis Khan also not too bad:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica
|
| Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did
| they commit to establish it?
| deadbabe wrote:
| Sometimes you have to do a lot of things that look very bad
| in order to do some greater good that overshadows all the
| bad you did.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always
| tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than
| an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the
| Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an
| argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know
| that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to
| justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they
| established after all the war. But is the cost really worth
| it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to
| justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never
| mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through
| oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus,
| it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never
| lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls,
| watered with yet more blood.
|
| Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace,
| would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody
| conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An
| actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO
| than Rome.
|
| Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever
| they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and
| power, and their actions are optimized for that over any
| actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors
| and colonizers were rightfully decry today.
| jfengel wrote:
| And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on
| eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose
| its measles-free status.
|
| It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be
| accomplished again.
| quesera wrote:
| We still have another chance for eradication in humans with
| Polio.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake
| vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0] ...The
| program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin
| Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician,
| Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining
| public health.[2][3] The program is credited with
| increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a
| rise in violence against healthcare workers for being
| perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy
| following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in
| Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of
| polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_camp
| aign_...
| ccppurcell wrote:
| This should be a war crime...
| tdeck wrote:
| War crimes are "for Africa and thugs like Putin".
| belorn wrote:
| Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time
| was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people
| would accept opening a criminal case.
| goku12 wrote:
| Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
| Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign
| policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely
| irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign
| nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
|
| I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-
| intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts
| of egregious meddling by the administration. There are
| much less educated and affluent countries that are
| nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet
| unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly
| referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that.
| I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the
| entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination
| program for it.
|
| Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium
| girls?), neither political party cares enough to not
| pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox
| and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold
| miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their
| dangers well enough to participate in their elimination,
| until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a
| deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by
| both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime
| irrespective of party allegiances.
| throw20251220 wrote:
| > Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
|
| How can you open a war crime case against a guy who
| already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was
| there a war? Maybe some special military operation
| against Bin Laden.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > How can you open a war crime case against a guy who
| already got a Peace Nobel Prize?
|
| Henry Kissinger (1973 Nobel Peace Prize together with Le
| Duc Tho) can be considered a war criminal:
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissin
| ger
|
| Yasser Arafat (1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with
| Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) was also very likely a
| war criminal.
| throw20251220 wrote:
| Should've could've. If the grandma had a moustache she
| would be the grandpa.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
|
| If Bush was in Power, of course the accusation would have
| to made against Bush. So, of course, the accusation has
| to be made against the president that was in charge at
| the time. Dark skin color does not give him a "Get Out of
| Jail Free Card".
| sigwinch wrote:
| Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as
| disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it's not on
| Fox is that it reminds Americans that we've only had one
| victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party
| contributed nothing positive.
| atoav wrote:
| I would accept it if it even if it was done by Ghandi.
| trueismywork wrote:
| Who is Ghandi?
| et-al wrote:
| It's probably a mispelling of a French domain registrar
| known for its nonviolent resistance.
| belorn wrote:
| It is approaches like that which gives some hope to the
| future. War crimes are indeed something which should
| never be allowed or overlooked. Being a political leader
| doesn't make people immune to criticism, but rather
| should be someone held to a higher expectation.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| International law does not apply to the leaders of the
| western hegemony. It is merely a tool used to oppress
| poor nations even further.
|
| This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a
| terrorist organization and the state behind it is
| responsible for some of the most disgusting things this
| planet has ever seen.
| kakacik wrote:
| CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and
| amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at
| least at this point, I can attest that every European
| country I've ever lived in carries some more or less
| visible involvements in past few decades although this
| one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
| throw20251220 wrote:
| > The program is credited with increasing vaccine
| hesitancy in ...
|
| Sounds like RFK Jr...
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Evil shit
| gosub100 wrote:
| Why would this cause everyone in the area to not
| vaccinate, and not just limited to parents who are on a
| most-wanted list?
|
| What made me disappointed about this was that they
| revealed how they did it, and they didn't rescue the
| doctor who helped them pull it off.
| epistasis wrote:
| Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will
| develop the informational and psychological technology to
| combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that
| brainwash people into harming their children with anti-
| vaccine beliefs.
|
| We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces
| are too new and we haven't developed defenses against
| information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two
| steps forward, one step back.
| vkou wrote:
| Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such
| informational inoculation benefit the rich?
|
| The current media status quo, and its consequences does,
| which is why we get to enjoy it.
| tjpnz wrote:
| As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to
| behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the
| lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject
| vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad
| choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your
| parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United
| States should have to present vaccine certificates at
| airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
| epistasis wrote:
| Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the
| US's completely unacceptable level of measles.
|
| Thinning this is a _US_ problem completely misunderstands
| the nature of the misinformation problem.
|
| And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel,
| according to how public health officials determine
| threats.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Canada already lost their measles elimination status and
| had several times higher measles rate than the US.
|
| At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an
| American problem is just pushing anti-American bias.
| Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost
| worldwide problem.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| > you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents
| were neglectful
|
| if you are still alive.
| jfengel wrote:
| I admire your optimism. I genuinely wish I could share it.
| I hope that you are right.
| epistasis wrote:
| Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of
| many of the mental viruses that are destroying
| democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is
| proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the
| people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months
| ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had
| not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than
| Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I
| would probably be feeing far different.
|
| Things in the US are going to get far worse from here,
| and there will be a political war, but at least there
| _will_ be a political war against the fascism. A lower
| bound has been established for badness that at least
| allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this
| hopeful since October 2024.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority
| (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth
| is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach
| those conclusions if school books taught something else?)
| stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by
| trusted authorities?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat
| and orbits the sun?
|
| Pun intended?
| somenameforme wrote:
| People can simply have different perspectives on things.
| Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox
| has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk
| from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for
| individual choice.
|
| There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In
| fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it
| was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox,
| which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox
| (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small
| pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
|
| But there's a long history of people trying to self
| vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox
| including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds
| to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to
| say that came with well understood side effects up to and
| including full-on small pox infection. But when the death
| rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things,
| because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
|
| ---
|
| FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children
| against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because
| it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality
| rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k
| to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced
| in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I
| also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other
| direction either.
|
| [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-
| death-r...
| jfengel wrote:
| I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance
| of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier
| time making the decision.
| somenameforme wrote:
| A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I
| found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual
| attitude towards death. I suspect the average person
| doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly
| is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million
| chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about
| 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also
| extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance
| of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite
| high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 =
| 10 micromorts of risk.
|
| All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding
| suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the
| same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over
| the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables
| - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by
| airplane, and so on.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
| jfengel wrote:
| In a world with a low vaccination rate, infection with
| measles is practically 100%. It spreads more easily than
| COVID.
|
| You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want.
| That works well now, with a near universal vaccination
| rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you _will_
| get infected.
| riversflow wrote:
| Getting sick isn't just life or death.
|
| My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy
| getting me vaccinated. I'm _significantly_ taller than my
| dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when
| he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
|
| People who don't get vaccinated are bad people. I have no
| qualms saying it.
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes,
| protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other
| children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It
| isn't just an individual choice. You should definitely
| fault people for going the other direction because they
| are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your
| child's friends getting measles.
| s0rce wrote:
| Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also
| impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important
| it helps a lot of people.
| davidgay wrote:
| I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this
| one, though.
| wesleywt wrote:
| Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in
| the way of human progress and history.
| WalterBright wrote:
| So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the
| way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to
| restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that GP commenter was referring to the
| other stuff.
| WalterBright wrote:
| He shouldn't leave people guessing what he was referring
| to.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Maybe not, but one can always converse curiously and ask
| them what they meant. It's nicer to respond to the
| strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says,
| not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My replies ended in question marks.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| You're really going to play the "just asking questions"
| card? You're smarter than this. Or should be.
| lukan wrote:
| There was another group of people famous for building
| innovative rockets, but are otherwise not associated with
| human progress.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
|
| So it is about the big picture. (And about small pictures
| like that of Elon making a salut like the other group).
|
| So yes, currently his rockets do not transport explosives.
| But that can change anytime and I expect it will very soon.
| lmz wrote:
| I thought American space flight etc was directly indebted
| to the people behind the V bombs?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Saturn V was simply a scaled up V2. The critical
| components were all there:
|
| 1. boundary layer cooling
|
| 2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the
| fuel through tubes in the nozzle
|
| 3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing
|
| 4. turbo fuel pumps
|
| 5. supersonic airframe
|
| 6. guidance system (although primitive)
|
| The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little
| damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to
| be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous
| resources into the V2 program, shifted away from
| producing weapons that were effective.
| Verdex wrote:
| Elon rockets are only interesting because they can be
| reused.
|
| What use is a reusable rocket with respect to explosives?
| lukan wrote:
| They can bring explosives to space, loitering space
| ammunition.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Pretty easy. The only limits are your imagination and
| depravity. You launch the rocket, drop an orbital vehicle
| behind, and land. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
|
| That vehicle could deorbit and drop a tungsten
| penetrator, smallpox, a nuclear device or any number of
| things.
|
| All funded by a combination of government spending and
| defrauding the public via the Tesla Ponzi scheme.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Dropping a tungsten penetrator from orbit is an idea only
| science fiction can justify. In the real world the
| economics never close.
| lukan wrote:
| Huh?
|
| In the real world we so far just managed to keep space
| free of military weapons not because they are expensive,
| but because of treaties. I just don't expect those to
| last much longer.
|
| And frankly I never looked into the concept, but why do
| you think, a space base tungsten penetrator would be way
| more expensive, than a nuke on a missile?
| WalterBright wrote:
| A car can be used to take people to the hospital, or it
| can be used to transport explosives.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a
| satellite based internet network that covers the all planet
| and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is
| "standing in the way of human progress and history".
|
| If you people could only hear yourselves talk...
| accidentallfact wrote:
| These people have been a problem in the west for over a
| century. They are unintelligent people who spend their
| lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with
| something worse, that they can understand.
| flawn wrote:
| It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says
| and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads
| this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at
| the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress &
| history.
|
| Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up
| on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| I don't think reading comprehension is his forte.
| i_cannot_hack wrote:
| Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something
| to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his
| image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering
| indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his
| personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his
| mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false
| reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.
|
| Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector
| on some ideological crusade was not advancing human
| progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical
| shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither
| was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems
| purely out of spite.
|
| > Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred
| for California's proposed high-speed rail system. ... At
| the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop
| proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink
| the high-speed train. He didn't actually intend to build
| the thing. ... With any luck, the high-speed rail would be
| canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of
| e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
|
| Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the
| damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him,
| and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the
| ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him
| humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward
| some technological utopia.
|
| Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon
| desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can
| be the one to save it."
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| I must have forgotten that Elon actually is the original
| founder of Tesla and not a phony. At best he's their money
| guy.
|
| Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do
| you actually think he has literally anything to do with
| them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without
| stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at
| all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10
| years you'll be glad we have a written record of your
| stance.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Yes , he does. And making fun of people who stutter isn't
| a good look.
|
| I will take the word of the world's foremost rocket
| engine engineer who was in the room with Musk a lot of
| times, to someone posting in ignorance on the Internet.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Haven't seen anything of your talking points make any
| reasonable impact in societal problems.
| vkou wrote:
| Is there any way that people can work to re-introduce it into
| society? I know some folks are making a lot of progress with
| MMR.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making
| fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| He has quite a bit of chemical warfare weighing down his
| record.
| adastra22 wrote:
| He killed millions. He fed billions.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Epstein was friendly with, and made more people smile,
| than he raped.
|
| Phil Spector produced music which meant a lot to a lot of
| people. Still a murderer.
|
| Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands, yet should
| always be labelled a mass murderer because he knowingly
| positioned hundreds.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| >Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands
|
| Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves
| thousands of lives
| Y-bar wrote:
| Not alone, but as a team I bet he did. Just as Fritz
| Haber did not personally save countless millions with his
| discovery, thousands of other people had to be involved
| there as well.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Billions. The total carrying capacity of the Earth maxes
| out at 4bn people, even with maximally optimized
| agriculture and a vegetarian diet. The extra half of the
| Earth's population today owe their existence to Haber-
| Bosch.
|
| It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen
| fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le
| Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-
| scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team
| that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of
| hundreds of people.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Please not that this was in relation to whether or not a
| general doctor saves lives... A lot of work is indirect.
|
| The Haber-Bosch process was never a two-man mission to
| "feed the world." Haber devised a laboratory method to
| fix nitrogen, and Bosch led the first industrial-scale
| implementation, but neither of them was personally
| producing, optimizing, transporting, and applying
| fertilizer across the globe. Turning that reaction into
| most of the world's nitrogen fertilizer required teams of
| chemists, engineers, metalworkers, factory operators,
| agronomists, logistics workers, and farmers, and an
| entire century of industrial expansion. If it truly were
| a two-person accomplishment, we would only need a handful
| of farmers per country, which is obviously not how
| agriculture or industry work.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a
| problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on
| getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals,
| nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the
| air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed
| diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food,
| most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the
| green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
| adastra22 wrote:
| Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air. You are deeply
| misinformed on this subject.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air
|
| That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied
| plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved
| specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria
| that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a
| form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants
| can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".
|
| (A link for anyone not familiar with this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule)
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| I completely agree, but to be fair, there are some people who
| are politicians _and_ helped to eradicate a disease [0] [1].
|
| [0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-
| erad...
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
| webdoodle wrote:
| Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort
| Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be
| released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity
| anymore.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| If you don't keep it then the first time you'll get to study it
| will be when the first bodies are recovered from your cities.
| runako wrote:
| Coincidentally, that would be the first time it would be
| urgent to study.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It would be a pretty shoddy bioweapon considering you can't
| really target it and vaccines are available.
|
| Maybe Russia or China are funding anti-vax idiots in the US so
| that it only affects America :-D
| webdoodle wrote:
| Most people aren't vaccinated for smallpox, and only a very
| small amount of vaccine is even produced, mostly for medical
| and military people. Targetting is easy, here's your blanket
| while the power is out...
| octate wrote:
| He did a great service to humanity
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