WILTIMS #163: ♪♫♪ Always look on the bright side of death... ♫♪♫

Today was the fourth introductory class of the week with the inaugural microbiology/immunology lecture. The professor took an hour to go over all the ways that micro inserts itself into current events. By the end of that period, I was pretty convinced that we were all going to die tomorrow of excruciatingly painful infections transmitted by bugs, bats, people, poultry and everything I eat.

This afternoon there was an optional talk by our chancellor on the history of eugenics and the ethics of medicine performed during the holocaust. It was a wonderful, if depressing, presentation. The takeaway was not to write off these travesties because they, the Nazis, did it and we, wholesome Americans, would never do such things. Eugenics was born out of science and championed by the US and Britain. They sent delegations to copy our state laws on involuntary sterilization. Germany just took our ideas to one logical (though horrific) endpoint. 

And doctors were some of the worst offenders. German doctors were the first to fulfil Hitlers mandate to euthanize undesirables by starving children. When this bothered some of the doctors' sensibilities, they devised a system to trick patients into a large tile room with a fake showerhead that would release carbon monoxide for a faster, less painful mass-killing. When war broke out on the eastern front and Germany needed a way to kill of millions of people, they simply scaled up the design and borrowed the British concept of concentration camps to store the condemned. The lucky ones were kept alive for medical research purposes.

Like I said, not exactly an upbeat discussion, but a fascinating look at the skeletons in all of our closets. One unsettling thought with which I came away was that though we no longer accept eugenics as an acceptable practice, the basic idea behind the science is still sound. We do pay a price as a society for being compassionate toward the sick, elderly and incarcerated. We could make stronger, smarter, and more pleasant people. We are ok with that in every other species. Why do you think dogs love us and look so weird? Why are horses so good a running and bad at everything else? We did animal-eugenics on them.

But I'd argue that part of what defines our species (at least in this century) is our compassion for everyone, especially the icky parts of society. We could help evolution to advance our species but we choose not to. We'll take the slow path to perfection, if needed. 

TIL: Most people that die from the flu actually die more specifically from secondary pneumonia. The lungs normally are covered in ciliated epithelium that pushes bacteria-ridden mucous out of the respiratory tract and into the esophagus. The flu damages this tissue and allows infectious microbes to flourish in the normally sterile lungs.

Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), found on the surface of macrophages, reacts to lipopolysaccharides.