The Blaisdell Blog

On April 26, 1954 the Salk polio vaccine field trials began.   It was the first time a “double blind” trial was used for a drug.   The now standard double blind study (where neither the patient nor the doctor know who is getting the real medicine as opposed to a placebo) involved almost 2 million children.   It began at Franklin Sherman Elementary School, an integrated school in McLean, Virginia.   The expanded study involved children from the United States, Canada and Finland.             I think the trials conducted in an integrated school reflect the largesse and truly humanitarian thinking of Dr. Jonas Salk himself.   The son of immigrant-Russian Ashkenazi Jews, Salk knew what mindless prejudice and institutionalized bias looked and felt like.   Salk was a risk taker.   He used a dead virus when common thinking assumed a live but weakened virus was better.   He tried the vaccine for the first time on himself and his son.   When it proved successful he refused to patent the vacc

“Close the door, we can’t afford to heat the outside.”   “Shut off that light, money doesn’t grow on trees.”   “Stop wasting water.   I’m not made out of money”   It seems that every child’s first lesson in economics comes in the form of a parent telling them to shut the front door.   This is not a bad thing.     Our parents’ admonition to “stop wasting water (electricity…heat…time…et.al.)” was dead on.   Water is a basic human need.   Yet, despite being a life-assuring requirement, usable water is not a given throughout the world, nor even the United States.   That is why I was excited to read an article about engineers at the University of Texas in Austin who have created a solar-powered technology that absorbs water from the air and turns it into clean water.   Every elementary school student knows the water cycle.   Evaporation changes liquid water into vapor.   Vapor is a gas which means it expands to fit the space available, so it ascends into the air and m

On Wednesday, August 11, 1999 the music of the spheres produced the last total solar eclipse of the 20 th century.   My husband and I planned to be in Paris for a chance to see this rare positioning of the sun, the earth and the moon. With a scant week in Paris, we also planned to see as much of the City of Lights as we could.   Given little time and much to do it is significant that we took a full day to tour Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris).             The Great Lady of Paris is over 800 years old.   It is located on a small island called the Ile de la Cite in the middle of the Seine River.   The construction was begun in 1163 and completed in 1345.   But these dates are approximate.   The fact is, that when you are talking about a structure this massive, built at a time when all construction was done through muscle power, the time of construction is not measured in time, it is measured in history.               Life has not always been easy for the Lady.   During t

We (you, me, our neighbors and our children) owe well over $20 Trillion dollars.   Now that is a number that is difficult to deal with.   Let’s try an analogy.   A million seconds is 12 days ago.   Where were you 12 days ago?   What were you doing?   A billion seconds ago was 31 years!   How old were you a billion seconds ago?   But a trillion seconds was 31,688 years ago.   That long ago was the time of Neanderthals.   Yet our national debt (the amount YOU owe) is not $1 trillion but $20 trillion!             Of course, we are not talking about seconds, but money.   If you have $10,000 in nice, new $100 bills it can be carried in one’s pocket, and even $1 million of the same can be put in a grocery sack, tossed in your back pack and carried wherever you go.   But $1 billion turns into a pallet of money at least 3 feet tall and a trillion covers acres of double stacked pallets.   Such numbers are almost beyond comprehension and thus tend to diminish in importance.             A