Month: September 2022

THE SWITCH. “Eventually, vaccination was accepted, and in 1840, the British government banned variolation – the use of smallpox to induce immunity – and provided vaccination using cowpox free of charge.” https://lnkd.in/dj2sruA View in LinkedIn

GLOBAL ERADICATION. “On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly announced that the world was free of smallpox and recommended that all countries cease vaccination.” Arguably, this also left the world vulnerable to a future outbreak. https://lnkd.in/eQfnZZv View in LinkedIn

GREATEST PUBLIC HEALTH SUCCESS. “Arguably one of the greatest successes in disease biology, and indeed in the whole of public health, was the elimination of smallpox from the face of the earth in 1979.” https://lnkd.in/des8sHN View in LinkedIn

MEMORIAL. “The discovery and promotion of vaccination enabled the eradication of smallpox: this is Edward Jenner's ultimate vindication and memorial.” https://lnkd.in/eQfnZZv View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this history of medicine portrait of the heuristic approach to problem solving. Society faced a severe public health threat from smallpox that killed millions. Physicians had little to go on but educated guesses, without the benefit of theory. The germ theory was only accepted in 1880; viruses were not isolated until 1892. Animal studies of diseases were not fully established until the later work of Koch and Pasteur, and preclinical vaccine testing was not required until the 20th century. While the ethics of these early studies has been severely criticized, today the world is free of the scourge of smallpox. View in LinkedIn

FOURTH DOMAIN PROBLEMS. “This effect of nonuniform evolutionary rates is a pervasive problem in the analysis of deep phylogenies. Indeed, a subsequent reanalysis of the phylogenies of several universal genes present in giant viruses has failed to find support for the fourth-domain hypothesis.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

EXPLOSIVE DIVERSITY. “The world of viruses and selfish elements is enormously diverse, even when one considers only viruses with a certain type of genomic nucleic acid (dsDNA) that infect hosts from only one domain of cellular life (eukaryotes).” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

STILL UNKNOWN. “The recent discovery of giant viruses infecting protists shows that we are still far from saturation in the study of viral diversity. Nevertheless, paraphrasing Einstein, the most astonishing finding about the virus world is that its history appears to be tractable.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

EMERGING PARADIGM. “We are now close to having coherent scenarios for the evolution of all major groups of dsDNA viruses of eukaryotes and perhaps deciphering certain general principles of this evolution.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

EMERGING PRINCIPLES. “One such key principle is the unity of the evolutionary processes among viruses and capsid-less selfish elements. However, the equally fundamental, complementary principle is the evolutionary persistence of viral morphogenetic modules.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn