America’s billionaires are rich in their finances and poor in reputation. They have not been getting good press lately.
For much of the past few decades, the common attitude in America was that it is morally permissible to become a billionaire as long as one “gives back” in the form of philanthropy. That was the attitude formalized in The Gospel of Wealth penned by the richest man of its day, Andrew Carnegie. But over the past several years, the debate has shifted to whether it should be legal for any entrepreneur to become a billionaire at all.
Heralding this change was a January 2019 interview that left-wing writer Ta-Nehisi Coates conducted with then-freshman U.S. Sen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Do we live in a moral world [if it is one] that allows for billionaires?” Coates asked her. “Is that a moral outcome?”
“No, it is not,” she replied. For this, she received uproarious cheers and applause.
She went on, “I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist — when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health — is wrong.” Here she insinuates that an entrepreneur possessing billions of dollars’ worth of wealth somehow contributes to those Alabamans being too poor to receive adequate protection from, and treatment for, ringworm.
Sen. Ocasio-Cortez’s answer made headlines. It became apparent that many people in the United States and other countries agreed wholeheartedly with it. Almost as famously as his boss, AOC’s policy advisor and senior counsel Dan Riffle was quoted throughout the media proclaiming, “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”
Still more notorious than AOC is a man with seniority over her in the U.S. Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “There is something profoundly wrong,” he shouted in his announcement for his 2016 presidential run, “when in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires [actually, ‘MILLIONAYAZ AND BILLIONAYAZ’] at the same time as millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages and we have shamefully the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country.”
Note the implication here — as with Sen. Ocasio-Cortez — that the “lower wages” and “child poverty” are at least partially caused by this “proliferation of millionayaz and billionayaz.”
That billionaire entrepreneurs have such an unflattering image can be seen even in attempts to compliment them. Such can be gleaned a video essay by pop-culture commentator Lindsay Ellis. Despite her overall sympathies for the anti-capitalist message of the computer-animated movie adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, she found herself vicariously embarrassed that it was presented in such a ham-fisted manner. In a gesture of perfunctory evenhandedness, Ellis states what she apparently considers to be the strongest argument in favor of for-profit commerce: “...corporations employ people and make us stuff — not useful stuff, but stuff.”
The triteness of her evaluation would not be so concerning, except that it seems even many of the most prominent “defenders” of free enterprise tacitly agree with this characterization. The best that can be said of market economics, it is believed, is that businesses “make us stuff,’ stuff that is “not useful.” The run-of-the-mill defense of capitalism is that it incentivizes the production of “stuff” much more effectively than do the State-owned enterprises of socialism. Socialism might manufacture not-useful stuff, but capitalism elicits much more competence in the assembly of not-useful stuff!
And as entrepreneurs become billionaires by hawking this not-useful stuff, we are told, these same entrepreneurs add to “child poverty” and Alabamans “still getting ringworm” by hoarding all the wealth and resources for themselves.
As Ocasio-Cortez added in 2020, the billionaires “made that money off the backs of single mothers, and all these people who are literally dying because they can’t afford to live.”
Human beings are “literally dying” for the reason that billionaires “made that money”? It is no wonder their legacy is tarnished.
Yet there is more to this story. Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci — the scientific married couple who cofounded BioNTech of Germany — became billionaires from developing the first existing COVID-19 vaccine. Noticing this, Louis Anslow, curator of The Pessimist Archive, tweeted out a Time magazine cover featuring these two, and asked in his tweet, “Are you sure no one deserves to be a billionaire?”
Anslow’s is a worthwhile question. To explore it, this essay comes in two parts. Part One ascertains that there is indeed more that can be said for capitalism and entrepreneurial billionaires than that they “make us stuff.” That many of the free market’s putative advocates tacitly agree with Lindsay Ellis’s belittling of capitalism’s benefits can be inferred from what they have omitted from their “pro”-capitalism statements. What they refrain from stating plainly is that free enterprise — more than any other sort of political economy, socialist or otherwise — has provided the freedom and impetus for innovators to save, lengthen, and enhance human lives. Not just about making us “stuff,” capitalism saves lives. And that is the point that capitalism’s so-called proponents should be emphasizing. If capitalism’s lifesaving nature were obvious to most people, not even an ideologue such as Lindsay Ellis could have been so confident in stating, as a generally accepted platitude, that capitalism is all about producing “stuff” that is “not useful.”
Hence, Part One is a series of over seventeen case studies of this principle in action. Where they are available, the estimated number of lives that a for-profit enterprise saved shall be enclosed. Most of those case studies involve pharmaceuticals and medical devices, but there are other examples that are far less obvious. Electric heating and air conditioners save lives as well. It was capitalism that facilitated the invention, production, and adoption of these technologies.
To Part One, a detractor can reply, “Yes, that entrepreneurs produce medical devices is nice. But as the Earth consists of a fixed quantity of nonrenewable natural resources, it follows that one person owning a billion dollars’ worth of resources means there is less for everyone else. In that respect, if someone invents a life-saving medical device and gains a billion dollars from that, a billion dollars’ worth of resources all going into the possession of this one man still adds to other people’s poverty and the premature death that it brings.”
Such an assumption fails to understand the actual nature of wealth — economic value — and its origin. Consequently, Part Two considers the prospect that there is no inherent limit to the amount of economic value to benefit human beings. Further, insofar as citizens are free and peaceful with one another, someone gains ownership over a billion dollars’ worth of resources to the extent that she created economic value that was of at least that much worth to others. Part Two also summarizes how capitalism contributed to boosting living standards overall, sometimes even in the poorest countries where the government allows for relatively little capitalism. Whereas Part One focuses on specific inventor-entrepreneurs whose efforts have saved lives, Part Two ends with a summary of how peaceable commerce, in total, saves lives on an international scale.
With that, we take a journey into the past two centuries of entrepreneurship and its lifesaving.
PART ONE: PROFILES OF LIFESAVING FOR-PROFIT ENTERPRISES | ^
Creativity in the Age of COVID | ^
The married couple of scientists, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, co-founded BioNTech in Germany and partook in a joint venture with the USA’s Pfizer to develop the USA’s first vaccine for COVID-19, one that is an mRNA vaccine. Various attempts have been made to attribute this success more to taxpayer funding than to the couple’s initiative. President Donald Trump tried to take credit for BioNTech’s achievement, proclaiming that it came from Operation Warp Speed, his administration’s program to provide federal funding to synthesize such a vaccine. Yet BioNTech and its American collaborator, Pfizer, did not receive money from this program.
Other parties have said that BioNTech owes its success €375 million (the equivalent of 425 million U.S. dollars) to BioNTech is what should be credited. Yet this grant was made in September of 2020. As Johan Norberg points out, BioNTech’s vaccine had already gone into Phase III clinical trials five months earlier. The actual R-and-D that went into the specific vaccine’s creation did not come from a national government.
Nor was the federal government particularly enthusiastic about the work of the academic biochemist who laid the foundation for such mRNA vaccines, Katalin Karikó. Her role in lifesaving did not net her the billions it did for her BioNTech employers Sahin and Türeci, but it did earn her millions. Moreover, her experiences should be a revelation to those of us who assume that nonprofit academia is generally more open to new ideas than are supposedly greedy for-profit corporations.
In the 1980s, Dr. “Kati” Karikó suffered under communism in her native Hungary. She and her loved ones had to escape. When she and her family came to the USA to start anew, they had no more than what she got from selling her car — the equivalent of $1,200, which she concealed inside her daughter’s teddy bear.
In 1990, the potential of mRNA vaccines had entranced the Hungarian emigrant, now at the University of Pennsylvania. To familiarize a patient’s immune system with the sort of virus that it had to fight, a more-conventional vaccine introduces the immune system to a dead or weakened version of the virus or just a piece of it. By contrast, the vaccines that interested Dr. Karikó would carry chemicals consisting of special instructions for the immune system. These instructions were a “message,” making the vaccine a “messenger” — the m in “mRNA.” The mRNA would instruct the immune system on how to construct its own copies of pieces of the virus. The constructs from within the body would acculturate the immune system with the attributes it needs to recognize in the virus to be targeted. Once the immune system comes into contact with the virus in actuality, it is equipped to identify the virus and pulverize it.
But much of the initial hopefulness over mRNA vaccines dwindled among academicians. When they were injected into laboratory mice, it triggered immune reactions so virulent that it killed the rodents. Dr. Karikó wanted to uncover the cause of this over-inflammation and rectify it. Yet hardly anyone else shared her enthusiasm. The grant proposals she wrote were denied consistently. Eventually in 1995, her department threatened to fire her if she did not accept a dock in pay and a demotion to adjunct professor. And this ultimatum coincided with her receiving a cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Karikó accepted the indignity of that demotion as she battled her cancer. Collaborating with her UPenn colleague Drew Weissman — whom she met as they both rushed to use a university photocopy machine — she searched for answers on what the difficulty was.
An experiment from 2005 brought one such answer. For the control sample, Karikó and Weissman provided tRNA (transfer RNA) to mice. The mice from the experimental sample received mRNA and, as usual, suffered the anticipated life-threatening inflammation. Yet the mice getting the mRNA were fine. The distinguishing factor came down to a single molecule, uridine, which was in the tRNA but not the mRNA. When a mouse’s immune system encountered tRNA, the presence of uridine signaled to the immune system to accept the tRNA as if it were something from the host’s own body. By contrast, on account of uridine’s absence from mRNA, the mouse’s immune system interpreted the mRNA as a foreign intruder — much like a virus itself — and this instigated the immune system’s overreaction.
To determine if this could be corrected, Karikó and Weissman conducted yet another experiment. This time around, they inserted a synthetic protein called pseudo-uridine — which is similar to uridine — into the mRNA. As hoped, the pseudo-uridine in the mRNA proved to be an adequate substitute. Against the odds, Karikó and Weissman had rendered mRNA vaccines safe for mice and humans alike.
Karikó and Weissman got their results published in the medical journal Immunity. Other than that, the rejection from academicians continued. They were still turned down for grants. It was the for-profit BioNTech and its rival, Moderna, which expressed interest in the results.
In 2013, Dr. Karikó pleaded with her UPenn department to restore her faculty position. She recounts that her superiors “told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality.” Having had enough, she informed her department that she would accept BioNTech’s offer to become the company’s senior vice president. There, she would try to apply the information she gathered. These university bureaucrats laughed at her and then cracked, “BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.”
Those smug university administrators are not laughing now. Dr. Karikó patented her work, licensing it to both BioNTech and Moderna.
She says she now has a net worth of around $3 million. That is far less than what the company’s cofounders have, but when it comes to justice for this woman, it is a start.
And Şahin and Türeci are not the only scientists to have become billionaires from producing and providing a COVID vaccine. The same happened to figures associated with Moderna as well, mostly from the appreciation of the shares they had purchased at the company’s founding.
Among those to gain a billion from such appreciation is the company’s president, Stephen Hoge. A medical doctor, he was also hands-on in leading the R-and-D team that assembled the vaccine with longtime experts from academia, Barney Graham and Jason McLellan. Consistent with Dr. Karikó’s discoveries, Moderna was able to have the messenger RNA synthesize pieces of the virus. But there was still one crucial piece for which another technique was imperative. This was the spike protein with which SARS-CoV-2 enters human cells.
Hoge had the team apply the proposal of McLellan and Graham that when it came to getting the immune system to guard against SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, it was sufficient to introduce to the immune system a substitute that was similar enough. That came from the MERS virus (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), which McLellan and Graham had studied for years.
Three of the other people whom Moderna had made into billionaires were early investors. Very prominent among them is Moderna’s chair, Noubar Afeyan.
Afeyan is, like Uğur Şahin, an immigrant to the West from a Muslim-majority country. Had modern nationalist movements prevailed in their stated objectives, and no immigrants from Muslim-majority countries were able to reach the West, it would have reduced the likelihood of the world having available this weapon against the pandemic.
Trained in chemical engineering, Afeyan coauthored numerous academic papers. He is named as an inventor or co-inventor on over 100 U.S. patents. These often involve new processes to be implemented in the biomedical sciences. His experience in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals has given him insight on which firms and projects in these industries will make for promising investments. Through his venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering, he became Modern’s principal shareholder.
Timothy Springer was another one of those initial investors who placed cash directly into Moderna. As Forbesreports, “Springer was a founding investor of Moderna in 2010, when he put about $5 million into the company. Now, a decade later, that initial investment is worth nearly $870 million.” Langer as well, saysTime magazine, was “one of the first” of Moderna’s direct funders. And even before their investments in Moderna, Timothy Springer and Bob Langer engaged in commercial ventures that improved health and human life.
In his early career as a researcher, Springer made important discoveries about integrins. As the Wall Street Journalexplains, “Integrins snare immune cells from the bloodstream and shuttle them to the site of an infection or injury. In autoimmune disorders, they traffic immune cells that attack the patient’s own tissue.” Springer spearheaded the commercial development of drugs to block the integrins that cause one such autoimmune disease, inflammatory bowel syndrome. He also guided the commercial development of drugs based on findings from colleagues who had partnered with him. Herman Waldmann discovered the antibody, alemtuzumab (CAMPATH-1). Springer founded the firm LeukoSite to license Waldmann’s antibody to treat multiple sclerosis — often a cause of life-threatening complications — and leukemia.
Robert Langer got his start in healthcare as the protégé to a medical researcher who, like Kati Karikó decades later, would long endure as an outcast for contradicting the establishment and for pushing back on the prejudice against commercialization. In 1962, Harvard Medical School surgeon Judah Folkman arrived at the theory of angiogenesis. Per this theory, tumors attract blood vessels to themselves and, from this tissue, form their own vessels through which blood flows to nourish the tumors. Folkman concluded that if he could cut off their blood supply, he could weaken or kill the growths. Rather than acclaim for this eureka moment, Folkman was met with ridicule. Folkman having surgery as his specialty, his theorizing about cancer apparently had other academicians reacting as if he were intruding on the disciplines of others.
As it was with Dr. Karikó, Folkman went for years with no luck in obtaining research grants. Then in 1974, he won a ten-year grant of $23 million from Monsanto Corporation on the understanding that the company would have first crack at commercializing any practical medical applications that could be divined from his findings. This was the first instance where Harvard allowed a faculty member to submit a patent application. Dr. Folkman received several patents, and the commercialism antagonized his detractors all the more.
To test his theories, Dr. Folkman looked for some tool to deliver adequately the chemicals that would go into a tumor and destroy its blood vessels. Here he received the assistance of Robert Langer, then a graduate student working under him at Children’s Hospital Boston. The promise was in Langer’s artificial polymers, such as Silastic. A major difficulty in healthcare is the administering of a drug in the proper dosage on a proper schedule. Langer placed a drug inside of a polymer casing that would then go into the patient’s body. By intention, the casing had many pores through which the drug would travel slowly as it made its way through the body. The drug would finally be released upon reaching the outermost pores. Langer designed the casing so that the proper dose of the drug would exit the casing and enter the patient’s organs at the proper rate.
Folkman had to run numerous experiments before settling on particular drugs and the proper dosages for them. In different tests, Langer’s polymer casing released the chemicals at different rates for study. Several drugs today are on the market that cut off the blood supply to tumors, a result of Folkman and Langer’s work.
Afeyan, Springer, and Langer took the millions of dollars they had earned from their prior lifesaving work and plunked these sums down into Moderna at its inception. The cash went to procuring for Hoge and his team the equipment and other resources that went with running the experiments whereby they developed their mRNA vaccine in competition with BioNTech’s.
Are the contributions of Şahin, Türeci, Hoge, Afeyan, Springer, and Langer to the commercial development and distribution of COVID vaccines enough to make them deserving of their respective billion-dollar fortunes? A team led by Alison Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health found that from January to November 2021, COVID vaccines had already saved 1.1 million lives in the United States. Likewise, data from 33 European countries evince that between December 2020 and November 2021, the vaccine saved a total upward of 469,000 people in these countries who were already above the age of 60.
Someone who was not integral to the formulation of this vaccine, but who was nevertheless helpful on COVID, is someone who already had over $100 million. That would be Jonathan Rothberg, the creator of an improved at-home kit whereby people can test if they have COVID and receive the results within one hour.
Rothberg first gained renown for combining his expertise in both biology and information technology. He thereby made a splash in “biometrics” — to take a reading of someone’s health by having the effects of her body be inputs scanned by a machine into its computer that interprets and processes the data. This is crucial to discerning the genetic sequence of a human being or any other lifeform.
In the 1970s, Fred Sanger needed four years to sequence the genome of a virus As the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first, scientist-entrepreneur J. Craig Venter and his rivals at the federal government’s Human Genome Project spent eighteen years on drawing a generalized map of the human genome. As of this writing, it now takes two days to gain a more accurate model of a specific person’s DNA sequence. Innovations on Rothberg’s part contributed to that final development. And once your DNA is sequenced, it becomes easier to identify the heritable diseases for which you are most at risk. According to an important chart by the firm Aperion Care — one the World Economic Forum featured on its official website, and which we shall discuss further later — this gene mapping saves five million lives annually. Work on this matter accounts for the affluence that Rothberg earned in the earlier portion of his career. Through his prior map of the human genome, Craig Venter cultivated a fortune as well. The New York Timesannounces, “He estimates that his net worth is in the tens of millions of dollars, even after giving more than $100 million” in shares of his companies “to endow his research organization, which is now called the J. Craig Venter Institute.”
By the spring of 2020, Rothberg then found himself concerned about COVID’s spread. There were two ways for technicians to determine if someone was carrying the virus. The more accurate method was the PCR test, and it took days for its results to come out. Given the relatively long wait, someone’s results could come back negative by the time that she went out again and contracted the virus after all. The other testing method involved antigens. The results of these tests could arrive in a day but their accuracy was often questionable, missing over one out of five positive cases.
Already a multimillionaire by then, Rothberg sought to place the quick response of the antigen tests together with the greater accuracy of the PCR ones. The team he assembled had formulated what was known as PCR-like molecular test. This new test could deliver accurate results within the hour. Starting in November 2021, Rothberg made these tests available to households, pricing them at fewer than $60 per unit.
As COVID’s Omicron variant spread throughout the world, Rothberg’s product became especially sought-after. And noteworthy about Rothberg’s efforts is how they undermined a form of symbolism that has long been exploited to denigrate capitalism. The giant yachts owned by the world’s richest citizens are frequently cited as physical representations of billionaire decadence. As Sen. Ocasio-Cortez would have it, people are “literally dying” from being deprived of the same resources with which billionaires gift themselves needless toys such as these. Yet Rothberg’s “superyacht” played a grand role in his lifesaving.
Rothberg and his children were sailing when the lockdowns of March 2020 began. Fortunate for everyone, Rothberg has his own laboratory on this vessel. From the lab of the yacht where he quarantined, and relying heavily on telecommunication, Rothberg marshaled his team of scientists, engineers, and technicians in bringing his accurate, rapid-result COVID test into reality. This yacht owner’s initiative is a great addition to the work of those who brought us COVID vaccines.
Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Stephen Hoge, Noubar Afeyan, Timothy Springer, and Robert Langer helped create a product and service that saved over a million lives and, in turn, each became a billionaire. I consider that justice. And this is far from unique when it comes to healthcare companies in particular and to capitalism in general.
Yet such an idea sounds strange to the general public. The common interpretation is Ocasio-Cortez’s: masses of people are “literally dying” because businesspeople “made that money”. Big Tobacco, which sells snack food as well, hooks its victims on nicotine. We are told that the billionaire Sackler family knowingly pushed senior citizens to become addicted to opioids. Even the bestselling self-help guru Robert J. Ringer, who has publicly praised Ayn Rand and free-market economics, approvingly quotes a “friend” in pronouncing that “the greatest mass murderer in history” was not “Adolf Hitler” or “Joseph Stalin” but “Ray Kroc.” Ringer blames the McDonald’s maestro for putting out hamburgers that that “succeed year after year in piling up impressive fatality numbers that would make run-of-the-mill serial killers envious.” The reader may therefore be surprised that abuses are the exception. It is shameful that Lindsay Ellis can go unchallenged, for years, in her assumption that the best that can be said of capitalism is that enables corporations to “make us stuff — not useful stuff, but stuff.” She should have been asked immediately whether she considers pharmaceuticals and medical devices to be “useful stuff.”
The remainder of Part One of this essay shall provide case studies of for-profit initiatives saving lives and enriching the entrepreneurs in the act. Most of these case studies involve pharmaceuticals or medical devices, but not all. Part One also gives examples of entrepreneurial innovations that are probably not so obvious in their lifesaving qualities. Not all of the entrepreneurs named have become billionaires; some of them did not even become millionaires by the standard of their time. However, all of them did attain financial successes by the standard of their era. And in all instances was it that commercialization was crucial to the lifesaving.
When it comes to projects that tally the number of lives saved by inquiries like Dr. Karikó’s, or by other products, there are two that are especially helpful. One is a project started by science journalist Billy Woodward. It began as a nonfiction book of his, Scientists Greater Than Einstein, which profiled several scientists and their lifesaving discoveries. He employed a statistician to tabulate the number of lives saved by each discovery. Woodward then created the website ScienceHeroes.Com to promote the book.
Noticing that there are might have been discoveries and innovators that his book might have missed, Woodward continued researching and hired other experts to advise him. Sure enough, he was right. There were other wonderful accounts of history he had not known before, and he updated the site frequently to incorporate this new information.
The other illuminating project arrives from the health company Aperion Care, introduced in a web post by employee Heather Levine. This project tallies the number of life saved by various technologies. This index was cited by Jeff Desjardins for his website Visual Capitalist. This information so impressed experts that they had Desjardins’s essay on it reproduced on the official website of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In spite of the WEF’s founder speaking disparagingly of “neoliberalism” as a foil to the “stakeholder-based corporate social responsibility” that he prefers, this information on the WEF website gives a flattering impression of the creativity that “neoliberalism” fosters.
In the essay you are currently reading, the numerical figures on lives saved by specific drugs or medical devices are usually sourced to ScienceHeroes.Com. As for the figures on lives saved by other inventions, most of them come from the World Economic Forum’s write-up on the Aperion Care estimates.
Patrick and Paclitaxel | Patrick Soon-Shiong and His Cancer Drug |^
Another lifesaving billionaire is Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D. This story might seem, at first glance, to be one of taxpayer funding being the lifesaver. But soon Soon-Shiong arrives to provide the twist.
This tale began with the federally funded National Cancer Institute dispersing grants for the promising research of Monroe Wall and Mansukh Wani. From the bark of the Pacific yew tree, they derived the chemical that could be applied to treat cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Under the brand name Taxol, this chemical eventually went under the scientific name of just “paclitaxel” or “sb-paclitaxel.” This may initially seem an example of the superiority of government-directed investment over private enterprise, but the “sb” in “sb-paclitaxel” — sb for “solvent-based” — alludes to the difficulties with this treatment. On account of the complications with sb-paclitaxel, various scientists and businesses sought improvements over the drug. One was docetaxel, isolated by Pierre Potier in France. However, docetaxel presented similar problems.
To be administered in chemotherapy, sb-paclitaxel and docetaxel must be dissolved in a liquid called Cremator EL. Unfortunately, this solvent is toxic and impedes upon the patient’s ability to tolerate the medication. The patient must therefore consume other strong drugs, such as corticosteroid and antihistamines, to reduce the nausea that comes with either of these solvent-based taxanes.
This was where Patrick Soon-Shiong entered the scene. A medical doctor originally from South Africa, he had a bitter falling out with his brother and other investors over medical ethics. In 1985, Patrick’s brother and the investors tried to pressure him to perform a surgical operation under conditions that he considered unsafe for the patient. I previously blogged about this.
Patrick told interviewers in 2008, looking back, that the investors told him he should go ahead with the procedure and he will be penalized with nothing more than “a slap on the hand from the FDA.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not all I’ll suffer. We’ll put patients’ lives at risk and I will not do it.”
Patrick was adamant. His brother and the other investors responded by suing him. Following that dispute and his move to the United States, the surgeon turned his attention to paclitaxel.
Patrick Soon-Shiong originally wanted to find a method for administering paclitaxel without the need to dissolve it in Cremator El. He looked to albumin, a chemical already found in the human body, being the most prominent protein in blood plasma. At the microscopic level, the doctor wrapped the paclitaxel inside an “envelope” of albumin. The paclitaxel was therefore administered to the patient inside this albumin “envelope.” Scientifically, this treatment went by the name of nab-paclitaxel — the NAB being for “Nanoparticle Albumin-Based.”
Although Soon-Shiong mostly wanted to make paclitaxel easier for patients to tolerate, it came with a fortuitous additional benefit. This new version, Hwaryeon Lee and company report in the journal Nature, turned out to be “more effective than the conventional solvent-based (sb) paclitaxel in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer.” In trials, the nab-paclitaxel outperformed the conventional sb-paclitaxel in the rate at which the metastatic breast cancer could be controlled and in terms of the patient’s ability to survive without the cancer progressing. William J. Gradishar and colleagues found in 2006 that metastatic breast cancer patients who received nab-paclitaxel even had almost double the overall response rate than did those receiving the conventional sb-paclitaxel. And Hwaryeon Lee and company add that the patients receiving the nab-paclitaxel also had a longer overall survival rate than those receiving the other alternative, docetaxel.
Soon-Shiong patented nab-paclitaxel and marketed it under the brand name Abraxane. The extent to which this drug outperforms conventional paclitaxel is the extent to which this man’s private and for-profit initiative saved additional lives. And this lifesaving made Soon-Shiong a titan of commerce. As of this writing, his net worth is $7 billion.
Soon-Shiong’s success in light of his refusal to perform that dangerous operation all those years ago highlights an important principle. The common assumption is that someone’s profit-seeking goes with a flagrant disregard for the well-being of other people. On that premise, one would assume initially that Soon-Shiong was sacrificing a profitable career when he refused to put that patient’s life at risk. Yet the truth is the opposite — malpractice on Soon-Shiong’s part would have damaged his credibility. Potential patients and later clients would have wisely avoided him, impeding on his moneymaking ability. It was to the very extent that he looked out for the best interests of patients that Soon-Shiong was able to win trust and build his company.
The Creation of CRISPR | Jennifer Doudna, George Yancopoulos, and Gene Editing | ^
Since then, the exciting opportunities in medicine have expanded, especially in biotech. The gene-splicing method of CRISPR takes advantage of a protein from bacteria called Cas9. Viruses such as bacteriophages prey upon bacteria, and bacteria have hence evolved their own immune systems to protect them. The chemical Cas9 is a weapon whereby the bacteria slice viruses into separate pieces, neutralizing the threat they pose.
A team at U.C. Berkeley led by Jennifer Doudna demonstrated that Cas9 can be employed to slice strands of human DNA in specific places. That is groundbreaking, as various life-threatening diseases are caused by inherited genes. Such illnesses include sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and Huntington’s disease. CRISPR can be employed to enter someone’s DNA and edit out the sequences that cause these illnesses to manifest. Although Dr. Doudna has stated that she refuses to go so far, it is even theoretically possible to edit such inheritable diseases out of an embryo. Once the embryo grows into an adult human being and has children of her own, there would be a substantially reduced risk of her own children and descendants inheriting that same genetic disorder. One generation inheriting the CRISPR-edited improvements of previous generations has been dubbed “germline genetic engineering.”
To commercialize medical treatments developed from CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna co-founded Caribou Biosciences with a former graduate student who worked under her, Rachel Haurwitz. Anticipating the profits to be made from the lifesaving treatments to be fostered, investors have driven up demand for shares in this publicly traded corporation. As of this writing, Caribou’s market capitalization — the total dollar value of all the company’s shares — happens to be $600 million. As Dr. Doudna owns 4.19 percent of the company, her fortune comes to $24 million. The single largest shareholder is Dr. Haurwitz at 6.09 percent, which is over $36 million.
Other good work continues with a scientist with whom Dr. Doudna has sometimes collaborated, George Yancopoulos. A recurring problem is that when medical scientists conduct tests on mice by exposing them to any particular substance, the mice are usually a model for how that same substance will affect human beings. Yet the immune system of a mouse, as a default, has significant differences from that of a human. Hence, what works in mice will not always work in humans. George Yancopoulos’s idea is to alter the mice themselves so that their immune systems will be more similar to those of human beings. This is his ongoing project at the company Regeneron.
Yancopoulos has earned over 100 U.S. patents, and his work as the chief of research and development at Regeneron Corporation has won the confidence of investors. Similar to what Jennifer Doudna has done for Caribou, the potential of the applications of Yancopoulos’s insights has driven demand for ownership in the company. The price of Yancopoulos’s stake has soared, making him the first corporate R-and-D head to attain the status of billionaire.
The collaboration of Regeneron with a company in which Caribou Biosciences holds a 21.9 percent stake, Intellia, has already saved lives. Patrick Doherty inherited a rare degenerative nerve disease called transthyretin amyloidosis. Under this condition, a protein in the body destroys the nerves in the hands and feet of sufferers, crippling and ultimately killing them. In an experiment funded by both Regeneron and Intellia, Doherty and five other patients had their genomes altered by means of a CRISPR technique that Regeneron and Intellia have refined.
This procedure was one of doctors inserting billions of nanoparticles into the patients, each nanoparticle designed to trigger the CRISPR gene-editor. Once the nanoparticles entered the patient’s liver, the nanoparticles activated the gene-editor. Cas9 sliced apart the DNA inside the liver that was producing the destructive protein. The patients have thus shown significant improvement.
Yancopoulos and Doudna take this as empirical evidence that CRISPR can indeed be employed to mitigate much-more-common genetic disorders.
And there are many other instances of for-profit undertakings resulting in lifesaving medicines. There is Dr. Paul Offit making $6 million for co-producing the rotavirus vaccine that saves 1.46 million lives every two years. There is also David Hamilton Smith co-producing a vaccine to prevent meningitis and starting his own company to market it. That vaccine would save 5 million lives and Smith’s company would sell for $232 million.
Capitalism Does Have a Heart | Wilson Greatbatch and Implantable Pacemakers | ^
Medical treatments such as vaccines, cancer drugs, and genetically engineered insulin are not the only lifesavers. Medical devices matter as well. Consider the implantable pacemaker. It was a fortuitous accident that inspired Wilson Greatbatch. In the 1950s, he was employed at Cornell University’s animal farm. He spent his time attaching machines to sheep and goats that monitored their brain waves, heart rates, and blood pressure. In a barn, he assembled these monitors by hand. One day, he absent-mindedly installed a resistor into his machine. That triggered a response in which the machine alternated between electrically pulsing for 1.8 milliseconds and then pausing for one second. This, by coincidence, matched the beating of human hearts.
This same decade, two cardiac surgeons had visited Cornell’s farm to observe the research performed on the animals. Greatbatch overheard them discussing the recurring issue of heart block. This was when the heart’s lower chambers failed to receive the electrical pulses they needed from the heart’s higher two chambers. Whereas many other people would have written off the old mistake with the resistor as a past annoyance and forgotten about it, Greatbatch drew a mental connection between that incident and the dilemma vexing the surgeons. The accident was the lead that he pursued. Because the patients suffering from heart block were not getting the electrical impulses they needed, Greatbatch knew that a machine could supply that.
Greatbatch worked on his implantable pacemaker from 1958 to 1960, spending his life savings of $2,000 throughout the struggle. When it came to finding a firm to manufacture units of this invention, Greatbatch first approached Medtronic. Given the very machine that launched the company, this seemed a natural fit. Ironically, Medtronic ultimately rejected Greatbatch’s model. He then pitched his creation to one of Manny Villafaña’s corporations — Cardiac Pacemaker, Inc. (CPI).
Villafaña accepted his offer. Lillehei served as a consultant here as well, and helped work out the bugs. As with St. Jude Medical, this other Villafaña outfit paid Lillehei in still more shares. When Villafaña sold Cardiac Pacemaker to Eli Lilly, Lillehei banked an additional $2 million.
As ScienceHeroes.Com determines, Greatbatch’s work saved over 22.5 million lives.
And, as a consequence of this lifesaving, Greatbatch’s pocketbook was not in poor condition either. The New York Timesstates, “Mr. Greatbatch profited handsomely from his invention and invested” in refining it to making models that were even safer. Subsequent to the success of his first pacemaker model, Greatbatch wanted to develop a more reliable means of powering the device. He found that in the form of a lithium-iodide battery in 1972.
Greatbatch’s profit was such magnitude that his estate could bequeath $10 million for the restoration of the pavilion of a historical landmark, the Darwin D. Martin House Complex.
It was a difficult journey. In an interview conducted in 1988, he remarked,
The problem for a small inventor today is the FDA. So many laws have been written that a small operator can’t do something like a pacemaker. The regulations are so complex and the required testing is so expensive that a small company can’t do it. . . . If I did today what I did twenty years ago, I would go to jail. Imagine making pacemakers in a barn and taking them to a hospital and putting them into patients! But we did it, and it worked. It was done very ethically, and a lot of people are alive today because of that work.
We commonly hear it said that the provision of healthcare to those who are in need, such as having pacemakers implanted into their bodies, is more important than the entrepreneur’s freedom to enterprise and keep the profit that motivates them. And, the contention continues, if provision of pacemaker implantations and other healthcare to the needy means violation of the entrepreneur’s freedom to enterprise and keep the profit, then so be it. Too often overlooked is that if the State had been too severe in restricting that freedom to enterprise and profit, entrepreneurs would not have been willing or able to invent pacemakers in the first place.
Enemy of Arthritis | Percy Julian, Sr., and New Foam for Fire Extinguishers | ^
Some innovators invent both pharmaceuticals and safety devices. One of them was Percy Julian, Sr., born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899, the grandson of slaves. In spite of the heavy discrimination, Julian put himself through school and became a prominent chemical engineer. He became director of research at the Glidden Company where he extracted chemicals from soy and synthesized them into new compounds. First at Glidden and then at his own firm Julian Laboratories, which he started in 1953, he produced steroids to treat the sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis.
Julian and his chemists were able to make gains in efficiency to the point where on some products they quadrupled production. On account of these gains, between 1950 and 1956, Julian was able to lower the per-kilogram price of progesterone, an ingredient in arthritis medication, from $4,000 to $400.
But Julian’s work did not merely relieve pain; it also cut down the number of fatalities. In the early 1940s, he made improvements on the substances contained in fire extinguishers. As recounted on the website of the PBS series Nova, at Glidden he “extracted a soy protein used in fire-fighting foam, which saved thousands of lives during World War II.”
In 1961 he sold Julian Laboratories for $2.3 million — $20 million in 2022 U.S. dollars. Much of the proceeds he would donate to the civil rights movement.
Duane and the Detector | Duane Pearsall and the Smoke Detector | ^
Percy Julian’s activism is an inspiration, and so is this tale about alarms. For decades, inventors and engineers had been trying to figure out how to create an alarm that would warn a home’s residences of a fire before it grew too large for them to escape. These inventors and engineers concentrated on trying to make a machine that would detect heat. By the early 1960s, these heat detectors were already being installed in residences. They would continue to be selling well into the late 1970s.
Yet their weakness was in their unreliability. The detection of a high temperature was not always the same as identifying the outbreak of flames.
In 1963, even as heat detectors were on the market, home conflagrations continued to kill thousands of Americans. That same year, engineer Duane Pearsall had set his sights on something else. The presence of static electricity disrupted operations in factories and photographic laboratories.
To address that interference, he started the company Statitrol — short for “Static control” — and, with assistants, constructed a device to measure ions in the air. He dubbed it his “static neutralizer.” One day as he was tinkering with it, a colleague lit a cigarette. The rising smoke triggered in the neutralizer and it blared uncontrollably. Many other people would have dismissed this reaction as just another complication or inconvenience, and forgotten about it. And Pearsall might have been one of them, had he not mentioned the incident to an engineer friend from Honeywell Corporation. This colleague inferred that this could be ideal for warning homeowners of the presence of a fire.
It turned out that heat detectors were not the best in warning about any emerging blaze. A stronger indicator was smoke. This inspiration led Pearsall to take the knowledge he had already gained from his progress with the static neutralizer and to apply it to this new inquiry.
The models put out by Statitrol were impressive. Yet Pearsall still had to work out the kinks, and he still had to demonstrate that his smoke detectors provided an advantage that the already-established heat detectors did not. Independent investigators, though, noticed the difference. Writing in 1974 in an academic paper for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), National Bureau of Standards research engineer Richard G. Wright assessed, “...smoke detector technology has advanced to the point where the judicious installation of one or two smoke detectors could be more effective than a house full of heat detectors in alerting dwelling occupants to a fire” (page 71).
History has borne out Wright’s evaluation. Yet there was already evidence for it by 1962. In that year, J. H. McGuire and B. E. Ruscoe found that the lifesaving potential of the presence of heat detectors in a home was 8 percent, whereas it was 41 percent for smoke detectors (“The Value of a Fire Detector in the Home,” Fire Study no. 9 [November 1962].”
In 1972, the rate of mortality from house fires in the United States was 57 in a million people. As smoke detectors and other safety measures became more commonplace in the home, that rate reduced. By the year 2009, it was fewer than 12 in a million.
And in contrast to the heat detector installations being between $700 and $1,200,
Pearsall’s smoke detector debuted in the Sears Roebuck catalog two years earlier priced at $37.88.
Yet Pearsall could have lost his chance at saving lives had a reputed champion of safety and lifesaving succeeded in thwarting him. That was corporation-bashing crusader Ralph Nader. In 1976, the Health Research Group division of his group Public Citizen sent a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The message was dire in tone. Sidney Wolfe, the medical doctor and activist leading the Health Research Group, noted that smoke detectors emit radioactivity. For that reason, Nader and Dr. Wolfe demanded that the NRC place a moratorium on its sale and use. Public Citizen denounced these gizmos as “mindless and dangerous,” followed by a demand that four million of these units be recalled.
Prior to Nader and Dr. Wolfe ever making a fuss, Pearsall already implemented precautions concerning the radiation. When Pearsall started out, his SmokeGard transmitted half a microcurie of Radium 226. Pearsall had already shrunken that to a single microcurie of Americium 241.
Fortunately for Americans who since have been warned of fires by their smoke detectors — and otherwise would have died — the wish of Public Citizen went unfulfilled. To its credit, the NRC rejected the demands of Nader and Wolfe. The NRC replied that the dosage level is what determines whether exposure to radiation and most chemicals is safe or dangerous, and that the dose of radiation from smoke detectors was too small to harm a household. The regulatory agency then noted that a person would already be exposed to over a hundred times more background radiation during a flight across the United States.
To that, Sidney Wolfe replied, rather unscientifically, “The issue is not how much radiation is released but why this extra amount of radiation exposure is necessary at all.” He was referring to how smoke detectors released slightly more radiation than did the heat detectors. He then insinuated that the heat detectors were already adequate in alerting people about fires. The figures on the reduction in deaths from house fires in the following years suggest something quite disparate from what Sidney Wolfe and Ralph Nader assumed.
Statitrol grew so much that, at one point under Pearsall’s leadership, the company boasted over one thousand employees. Yet Pearsall never forgot his hardships when he directed a team of just a few members. Following his success, he remained an advocate for small business. In 2004, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute gave him an award for “saving upwards of 50,000 lives from deadly residential fires over the past 30 years.”
Excellent Electricity | Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Air Brake, and Electric Heating | ^
Even when the technology is not made for an explicit lifesaving purpose, but is instead intended for uses that are more general, it could save lives. That happens with electricity generation. Suffering from the cold at night has threatened human lives since the Stone Age. Deaths from cold annually outnumber those from heat.
Prior to the advent of indoor electric heating, people had to heat their homes by burning firewood. In developing countries, where there are still millions of people cannot access to electricity, such people still have to do it, sometimes with dung. Although there is romance to the image of relaxing before a warm fireplace, this practice carries its own hazards. The fumes can build up in the lungs and ultimately cause growths in them. This is “indoor air pollution,” and there are figures that illustrate the extent of the damage it does.
Worldwide, but mostly in the developing countries, this indoor air pollution proves lethal for large numbers of human beings. Among the higher estimates is 3.5 million per year. That is 200,000 more than the number of people annually killed by the outdoor air pollution that is more familiar to us. This also exceeds the annual death rates of both malaria and AIDS combined. Even the lowest estimates are around 1.6 million per year.
The total number of casualties from indoor air pollution is 260 million, which is almost twice as many as those from all of the twentieth century’s wars put together.
The scourge of indoor air pollution is evident even in rich countries where people have access to electricity but, for aesthetic reasons, opt for fireplaces anyway. Eight percent of Britons do this, and half of them are categorized as “affluent.” Such a small portion of the U.K. population still heating with fireplaces is enough to excrete three times more air pollution than do all the country’s automobile emissions. Wood-burning stoves in the U.K.’s urban areas account for almost 50 percent of Britons’ exposure to carcinogens in particles of air pollution.
Considering all of the perils of the heating methods that people must rely upon when they do not have electricity, this absence is identified properly as “energy poverty.” The flip side is that these dangers and deaths are eliminated when people do have proper access to electricity — especially, in this context, electric heating.
Eighty-seven percent of the global human population currently has access to electricity. And, according to Our World in Data, 4.1 percent of the global population dies from indoor air pollution. That means that out of the Earth’s 7.9 billion people, that is 6.873 billion with electric power. Were it the case that this 6.873 billion did not have electricity and therefore had to rely on fireplaces for heating, and 4.1 percent of them died from indoor air pollution, that would be 281.793 million killed.
This suggests that simply in having electric heating in their homes, at least 281 million people have been saved.
By creating the electricity generation industry, rivals Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse contributed to this lifesaving. And, prior to this, Westinghouse had already made his first fortune with a different lifesaving device.
As it was for his future adversary, invention had been a lifelong vocation for Westinghouse. A prodigy, at age fifteen he had already designed his own rotary engine. A few years later, he would come up with the idea for which he was most famous. Traveling via locomotive then was especially perilous. For a train to stop, a brakeman would have to ride on the roof of a car. This brakeman would have to apply the brake on each car separately and then move on to the next car until the brakes were applied on all of them. On account of this arduous sequence of tasks, the train would normally travel for an entire two miles between the application of the first brake and the time that the train finally ground to a halt. In one year, as many as 5,000 American brakemen were killed during this sequence.
As a young man, Westinghouse came to the rescue with his air brake system. The train’s wheels would be connected to a tube. When the brake was applied, it sent compressed air through the tube that acted on the wheels of all the cars simultaneously. The distance the train would continue to travel upon application of the brakes was now in hundreds of yards instead of thousands.
The young Westinghouse introduced his air brake to the market in 1872. According to engineer Gary McCormick, this invention saved “hundreds of lives each year.” Sure enough, between the years 1890 and 1915, the fatality rate fell by more than 63 percent for railroad passengers and by more than 61 percent for employees. And that was the trend prior to the RSA going into full effect. Between 1890 and 1899, the fatality rate dropped by more than a third for passengers and by one-fourth for employees.
Having established himself as a successful salesman his air brake, Westinghouse turned his attention elsewhere. He took the millions he earned and invested them in other endeavors, such as competing against Thomas Edison in the market for electricity.
Edison’s ambition did not end with inventing and selling his practical incandescent lightbulb. People could only use it if their houses had electricity, something that no one possessed. For there to be demand for Edison’s lightbulbs, he had to make available the means to light it. For that reason, he set to work on providing a system for distributing low-voltage, high-current electricity — direct current.
It is misleading to say that Edison’s system made use of direct current (DC) whereas Westinghouse’s was all about alternating current (AC). Rather, Edison’s system made use of DC only, whereas Westinghouse’s made use of both DC and AC.
The issue with Edison’s system was that DC would only send electricity over relatively short distances — the length of a street. If all of today’s homes were lit only through DC, there would have to be a power plant on every city block.
Conversely, when alternating current is employed, the electricity can be transmitted over many miles, across entire U.S. states. A single power plant could transmit high-voltage, low-current electricity over mostly undeveloped terrain until reaching an urban center. Once the electricity reached the urban center, it would be sent to a transformer that would convert the electricity to DC — low voltage, high current.
Nikola Tesla invented the polyphase induction motor with which Westinghouse transmitted his high-voltage alternating current over miles. As, in his old age, Tesla frittered away his wealth on an unworkable scheme and continued to live expensively in the Hotel New Yorker, Westinghouse took care of him. Subsequent to George Westinghouse’s death in 1914, executives from his company continued to pay $125 monthly to cover Tesla’s room and board.
In 1938 — five years before his own death — Tesla described Westinghouse as
the only man on this globe who could take my alternating system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice... He was a pioneer of imposing stature, one of the world’s true noblemen of whom America may well be proud and to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude.
Dying in 1931, Thomas Edison had a net worth of $12 million. In 2020 U.S. dollars, that is $204 million, putting Edison a fifth on his way to being a billionaire.
Considering that at least 281 million lives have been saved by the proliferation of electricity throughout homes, these fortunes were well-earned. These are the billionaires maligned in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s diatribes.
Thomas Midgley, Now Depicted As Evil, “Has Saved Millions of Lives” | Thomas Midgley and Safer Refrigerators and Air Conditioners | ^
Just as George Westinghouse availed to people a safer way to protect themselves from the cold, Thomas Midgley availed to them a safer way to protect themselves from the heat. He did this through his improvements to air conditioning and refrigeration.
The engineer-entrepreneurs Willis Haviland Carrier and Stuart Cramer, Sr., had introduced air-conditioning in at the turn of the twentieth century. But there remained a tremendous disadvantage with the models of air conditioners and refrigerators that were on the market — the gases and liquids inside of them released fumes that were toxic to those who handled them. These gases and liquids were even flammable. They had caused fires that proved to be fatal. This problem was finally rectified in 1950 by a General Motors engineer in Ohio named Thomas Midgley.
If you run a quick Google search this instant on Thomas Midgley, in the results you will find that the man is routinely denounced as misguided at best and evil at worst. He invented leaded gasoline, which proved to be a major toxin. It usually goes unmentioned that Midgley’s work on air conditioning and refrigerants, which is demonized even more ferociously, has actually saved many lives.
At General Motors, Midgley reported directly to multimillionaire Charles F. Kettering, the engineer who invented the modern automobile’s self-starter. Kettering is the reason why car engines today turn on with a turn of the key. GM spun off a subsidiary company, Frigidaire, to refine air conditioners and refrigerators. Such technologies were connected due to GM’s interest in providing air conditioning in its vehicles.
Although leaded gasoline ended up being poisonous, in 1928 Midgley was genuinely interested in finding a technique to produce air conditioners and refrigerators that would not harm their users.
With two assistants, Midgley examined a pocket-sized periodic table. He knew the properties that were needed. Besides being nontoxic and nonflammable, it had to be stable with a boiling point within 0 to -40 º C. The element fluorine would work well except that it was toxic. He thus considered whether the fluorine could be rendered safe if it was bonded to some other elements to form a new compound. After all, hydrogen is dangerous all by itself as an element, but a reaction between two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom results in relatively safe H2O. Likewise, fluorine would be rendered safe if bonded with chlorine and carbon. The seeming answer to the problem was CFCs — chlorofluorocarbons, with which GM tagged the brand name “Freon.”
Still, there was an issue of whether it might turn out later that CFCs did not function as well as they seemed. Hence, General Motors had a backup. Midgley and his team also considered another class of compounds — hydrofluorocarbons, or “HFCs” — that potentially bore the same beneficial qualities as CFCs without the same drawbacks. If ever there was an unforeseen problem with CFCs, then HFCs might serve as a replacement. These machines were a great success.
Decades following Midgley’s death, other scientists discovered that sulfur dioxide emissions from the use of CFCs entered the Earth’s atmosphere and depleted the ozone layer. The federal government passed laws to phase out CFCs in the ensuing years. Yet, as science journalist Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes, the HFCs that became the replacement in air conditioners and refrigerators in the 1990s were “all substitutes discovered by Midgley and his colleagues.”
In recent years, the HFCs have been blamed for posing yet another dilemma. Although they do not have the same effect on the ozone layer, they still contribute to greenhouse warming. Besides his invention of leaded gasoline, this is the other reason that Midgley has become widely denounced all over internet. For such reasons, it appears Pope Francis has revived the idea that this technology is sinful. He intones that the “growing ecological sensitivity” he desires in people still “has not succeeded in changing” the world’s most “harmful habits of consumption... A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning.” This is a vice that the pontiff deems “self-destructive.”
How capitalism itself can address the issue of greenhouse emissions from air conditioners and other machinery is a matter to which we shall revisit in Part Two.
With the public not yet conscious of ozone depletion or anthropogenic climate change, Midgley rendering air conditioners and refrigerators safe — at least in terms of coming into direct contact with them and handling them — was a boon to GM. This success had made Midgley a multimillionaire.
He was not able to enjoy his new wealth as much as he expected. Beginning in 1940, he was stricken with polio. He underwent intense physical therapy regularly in a swimming pool but he remained paralyzed from the waist down. Throughout his mansion, he set up a system of ropes and pulleys to help him go about independently. Yet one day his wife found him dead, strangled by these same hoists.
Many of the websites condemning Midgley frame this death as a fitting metaphor for the man’s life — Midgley was killed unexpectedly by one of his own inventions, just as he lacked the foresight on how his more-famous inventions would kill others.
Representative of this schadenfreude is YouTube presenter Matthew Santoro, who generally holds a reputation for being a nice guy. He cracks to his audience, “And I know a lot of you right now are like, ‘Aw, it should’ve been the lead poisoning that got him. That would’ve been poetic justice.’ And, to those of you, I say, ‘You’re kind of sick — and right.’” Yet chemistry professor and historian Carmen Giunta observes that Midgley’s own family and loved ones had concluded that Midgley had committed suicide with these ropes. The reason that they let the media report that this was an accident was that persons who killed themselves were stigmatized even more severely back then. By comparison, allowing the public to interpret Midgley’s death as an accident was to save face.
Furthermore, what is usually glossed over is that Midgley’s innovations in air conditioning and refrigeration saved lives very directly. This can be observed in the changes in heat-related mortality in Chicago over the course of a century. In 1901 in the windy city, there were 10,000 heat-related deaths. In 1955, that figure had dropped to 885. In the heat wave of July 1995, it was 300.
In 2016, a team of scholars including Carnegie Mellon economist Karen Clay published a scientific assessment of heat-related mortality in the United States throughout the twentieth century. The team found that between 1940 and 2004, the statistical risk of dying from heat in the USA on a day of over-90-º-F temperatures had fallen by over 60 percent. Between 1930 and 2004, the risk of dying from the heat on over-80-º days reduced by three quarters. And what was the major reason for this reduction? The team admits that the adoption of “residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities.”
It is fortunate, then, that this technology has become increasingly affordable to those of lower income. In 1950, less than 18 percent of all U.S. households could access this technology. By 1997, over 68 percent of U.S. households below the official federal poverty line now had air conditioning. By 2005, among those under the federal poverty line, it was over 77 percent.
Midgley has much to do with how, as was said by Aperion Care and as was published on the World Economic Forum’s website, 2 million lives have been spared of heatstroke from 1950 onward.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne details how Midgley’s refrigerants saved lives through other avenues.
His safe refrigeration freed us from levels of food poisoning now known only in developing countries. Without Thomas Midgley, millions of infants would have died of diarrheal diseases, vaccination would have been ineffective, and fresh food could not be shipped around the world.
McGrayne notes that prior to 1931, vaccines kept at room temperature were effective for no longer than one week. As a repercussion, the one for smallpox was the only vaccine used routinely; the others were not because they expired too quickly. Conversely, subsequent to 1931, it was Midgley’s safe refrigeration that made it possible to preserve vaccines. It was Midgley who made possible the sweeping vaccination campaigns beginning in the 1940s. It was Midgley who made it possible for Kenneth Murray to save 15 million lives from hepatitis B, for David Hamilton Smith and Porter Anderson to save 5 million from Haemophilus influenzaea type B, and for Paul Offit to save 2,000 a day from rotavirus.For this reason, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne reminds her readers that Midgley’s safe refrigeration itself has “saved millions of lives.”
Some of those millions could be in an area she had not mentioned. Once blood is donated, it is preserved through safe, nontoxic refrigeration. ScienceHeroes.Com attributes the saving of 1.1 billion lives to blood transfusions. Many of those transfusions would not have taken place had it not been for Midgley’s initiatives.
Fritz and His Fertilizer | Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizer | ^
And there is something else that is ironic. Recall that a website frequently cited throughout this essay, ScienceHeroes.Com, was created by Billy Woodward to promote his book Scientists Greater Than Einstein. Although he describes himself as a “businessman” in the About the Author section, the book conveys its author’s unflattering impression of capitalism and for-profit enterprise.
Upon describing an action by Merck that he judges unethical, Woodward hisses that such an action is one “that those teachers who believe in Ayn Rand’s laissez-faire capitalism can teach in business schools and those who revere less the principle of selfishness can explore in ethics classes.” This disparagement is taken farther still on ScienceHeroes.Com.
The book’s final chapter argues that the private sector cannot and will not finance medical research adequately, and therefore there needs to be greater taxpayer funding of science. Woodward frames such “a choice for our future” as one of “Our Health” versus “Our Wealth.”
Yet in totaling the numbers of people saved by scientific projects, ScienceHeroes.Com provides information that is not completely consistent with Woodward’s generally unfavorable estimate of capitalist greed. The scientific endeavor that Woodward’s own website ranks as the one to have saved the most lives is . . . a for-profit venture.
This was the venture by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in the industrial production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. It is well described on ScienceHeroes.Com in two articles penned not by Billy Woodward but by one of the writers assisting him, April Ingram.
Even for reasons other than his commercialism, Haber is not someone who would normally be described as a humanitarian. Prior to the ascension of the Nazis, Haber was a fervent German nationalist, especially in matters of military conflict. During World War One, Haber eagerly assisted the German government in weaponizing chlorine gas to be dispersed on French soldiers. Yet, even considering his role as one of the founders of chemical warfare, Haber instigated a project that holds the record in number of lives saved.
In 1899, the British scientist Sir William Crookes warned that the farms of the West were exhausting all the nutrients of their soil. Soon, they would not be able to grow any more, and the starvation would result. Haber took this to heart. A decade following Sir William’s dire prediction, Haber formulated methods to produce synthetic fertilizer, ammonium nitrate. As an executive of BASF, Carl Bosch refined those methods and applied them on an industrial scale. This became known as the Haber-Bosch process, and it made its namesakes very rich.
Still, the ascension of the Third Reich doomed both these men. Although Haber was a Christian, the Nazis held his Jewish ancestry against him and banished him from practicing any science. This was a crushing blow to someone previously so worshipful of the German state. Bosch went to Adolf Hitler directly to plead on Haber’s behalf. The industrialist informed the führer that purging Jewish scientists would set the country back on physics and chemistry for a hundred years. To that, Hitler simply replied, “Then we’ll just have to work 100 years without physics and chemistry!”
As the Third Reich held a tight grip on the national economy, it was easy for Nazi officials to inflict reprisals on Germans who did not express sufficient enthusiasm for their governance. As Bosch was highly critical of the Nazis, he was gradually stripped of his duties at BASF. Bosch sunk into depression and alcoholism.
Even decades after their death, the process of Haber and Bosch continued to change the world. After the famines imposed by Mao Tse-tung’s communism, China under Deng Xiaoping applied the process and ended the starvation.
ScienceHeroes.Com admits that the for-profit venture of Haber and Bosch has saved “over 2.3 billion lives.” In a Wired article from 2013, Bill Gates informed his readers, “Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs” that the Haber-Bosch process “has made possible.”
All of the cases we have studied were about someone becoming obsessed with some problem or mystery and, in an attempt to solve it, exercised creativity in such a manner that resulted in saving people’s lives. This gives the lie to the claim by famous anti-capitalist Noam Chomsky that it takes a “lack of curiosity and independence of mind...” for someone to reach “the high end” of “income distributions...”
A “lack of curiosity and independence of mind” sure does not describe Katalin Karikó, Jennifer Doudna, Percy Julian, Patrick Soon-Shiong, or any of the other innovators who struck it rich.
