Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

And how much thought have you given lately to Karl Landsteiner? Karl who? He only saved a billion lives by his discovery of blood groups. Or how about these other heroes?

Scientist

Discovery

Lives Saved

Abel Wolman (1892–1982) and Linn Enslow (1891–1957)

chlorination of water

177 million

William Foege (1936– )

smallpox eradication strategy

131 million

Maurice Hilleman (1919–2005)

eight vaccines

129 million

John Enders (1897–1985)

measles vaccine

120 million

Howard Florey (1898–1968)

penicillin

82 million

Gaston Ramon (1886–1963)

diphtheria and tetanus vaccines

60 million

David Nalin (1941– )

oral rehydration therapy

54 million

Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915)

diphtheria and tetanus antitoxins

42 million

Andreas Grüntzig (1939–1985)

angioplasty

15 million

Grace Eldering (1900–1988) and Pearl Kendrick (1890–1980)

whooping cough vaccine

14 million

Gertrude Elion (1918–1999)

rational drug design

5 million

The researchers who assembled these conservative estimates calculate that more than five billion lives have been saved (so far) by the hundred or so scientists they selected.⁵ Of course hero stories don’t do justice to the way science is really done. Scientists stand on the shoulders of giants, collaborate in teams, toil in obscurity, and aggregate ideas across worldwide webs. But whether it’s the scientists or the science that is ignored, the neglect of the discoveries that transformed life for the better is an indictment of our appreciation of the modern human condition.

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language.⁶ It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry:

Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.

Yes, “smallpox was.” 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. The eradication program cost about the same as producing five recent Hollywood blockbusters, or the wing of a B-2 bomber, or a little under one-tenth the cost of Boston’s recent road-improvement project nicknamed the Big Dig. However much one admires the improved views of the Boston waterfront, the lines of the stealth bomber, or the acting skills of Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, or indeed of the gorilla in King Kong, this still seems like a very good deal.⁷

Even as a resident of the Boston waterfront, I’d have to agree. But this stupendous achievement was only the beginning. Wikipedia’s definition of rinderpest (cattle plague), which starved millions of farmers and herders throughout history by wiping out their livestock, is also in the past tense. And four other sources of misery in the developing world are slated for eradication. Jonas Salk did not live to see the Global Polio Eradication Initiative approach its goal: by 2016 the disease had been beaten back to just thirty-seven cases in three countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria), the lowest in history, with an even lower rate thus far in 2017.⁸ Guinea worm is a three-foot-long parasite that worms its way into the victim’s lower limbs and diabolically forms a painful blister. When the sufferer soaks his or her foot for relief, the blister bursts, releasing thousands of larvae into the water, which other people drink, continuing the cycle. The only treatment consists of pulling the worm out over several days or weeks. But thanks to a three-decade campaign of education and water treatment by the Carter Center, the number of cases fell from 3.5 million in twenty-one countries in 1986 to just twenty-five cases in three countries in 2016 (and just three in one country in the first quarter of 2017).⁹ Elephantiasis, river blindness, and blinding trachoma, whose symptoms are as bad as they sound, may also be defined in the past tense by 2030, and measles, rubella, yaws, sleeping sickness, and hookworm are in epidemiologists’ sights as well.¹⁰ (Will any of these triumphs be heralded with moments of silence, ringing bells, honking horns, people smiling at strangers and forgiving their enemies?)