The Human Brain - A Truly Marvelous Organ

I would like to spend some time talking about the marvelous organ we all possess and reliably take for granted – the human brain.  On average the human brain weighs between 1300 and 1400 grams (about 3 pounds).

This marvel of neuronal circuitry.  possesses about 90 billion neurons – those remarkably specialized cells designed to carry information through electrical impulses.  It has been demonstrated that the brain consumes nearly a quarter of all the energy the body produces in order to keep it functioning.

The Neuron

It is within this organ that consciousness arose during the course of  human evolution.    This profoundly organized structure is the site where all our perceptions arise and is the origin of our personal identity and our personality.   This brain is the site not only of our often unruly emotions but also of all the elemental qualities that make us sentient beings – our intellect, our ability to reason, to learn, to think, to analyze the world around us, to problem solve, as well as our creativity and our judgment.  It is also the center of our moral and ethical universe.

My point is that this marvelous organ that we possess is capable of so much more than we seem able to utilize.  With this amazing organic wonder, we can certainly fashion a better and more sustainable world than the one we have created to date.  Collectively, we have done an abysmal job at fashioning viable and enduring habitats for the globally far flung members of our species.  Instead, we have allowed short-sited and often emotionally-charged visions of our world to dominate our thinking and shape our misguided perceptions as to what constitutes successful living.  We have allowed the darker elements of our psyche - embedded within the lower brain - such as fear, vanity, violence and greed to dominate our thinking and sculpt our existence.

We are quite capable of transforming the world of humans into one in which all people can prosper and develop into individuals that actively discover and realize their full capabilities and potential.  We are quite capable of creating a world where hunger and war and needless suffering are effectively eliminated and one in which the future holds promise for everyone.  We are quite capable of finally and irrevocably removing ourselves from the endless cycle of violence and retribution that we have endured for millennia.

Why we continue to fail so miserably at realizing what we already possess is a mystery that continues to haunt me and will most certainly pursue me to my grave.           

The Tragedy of Aleppo

While the American political scene is apparently preoccupied with the upcoming Presidential election, an enormous human tragedy has unfolded in the ancient city of Aleppo in Syria.  Some families living in Aleppo go back to well over one thousand years. 

It is now the site of destruction of a horrific magnitude where hundreds of thousands of its residents are trapped with limited access to food, water and medicine as the city is under going a siege by Russian and Syrian government forces under the direction of President Bashar al-Assad.  The Syrian civil war has been raging since 2011 and in 2016 the United Nations determined that 13.5 million of the nation’s inhabitants were desperately in need of humanitarian assistance with about 6 million internally displaced and some 4.8 million refugees in other countries.  Worldwide, it is believed that there are currently over 60 million refugees who have been displaced from their countries of origin on account of conditions that make life apparently untenable.

The social, economic, religious and political reasons for the violent upheaval taking place in Syria that has razed the city of Aleppo and ravaged its citizens are complex and multi-dimensional. This particular tragedy exposes the abysmal failure of the human kind to come to grips with its apparent inability to fashion a human world where the peaceful resolution of conflict is the preferred and necessary approach.

Given the nature of the human condition and the inherent limitations of the human architecture, imperfection and conflict will always be present.  The problem, however, lies within the way conflicts are resolved once they become a reality.  Human civilization has been extant for at least ten thousand years; yet, the lesson has not been learned regarding the absolute and abysmal failure of violence and war as an effective response to conflict.

With the looming threat of climate change beginning to overshadow any chance for an optimistic future for humanity, it has become imperative that we learn how to effectively cooperate with one another and learn quickly.  Far too many humans are suffering needlessly.  This suffering comes at an enormous cost to all of us.  The ongoing tragedy of Aleppo is, in fact, a tragedy for everyone as members of an allegedly sentient race of beings that have the good fortune to experience life on this remarkable planet.

Arnoldo Gabaldón

Malaria is one of the world’s deadliest diseases.  It is especially prevalent in the tropics.  The life cycle of the causative microbial parasite – members of the plasmodium genus i.e. Plasmodium vivax is complex involving the Anopheles mosquito as a vector (see images below).  The nature of the infection is such that it has eluded the development of an effective vaccine for many years. 

Human red cells infected by Plasmodium vivax

In light of this, it is quite surprising that Dr. Arnoldo Gabaldón, born in 1909, in Venezuela made a significant contribution to the understanding of this disease and its implications in regard to public health.

Gabaldón earned a doctorate in medical sciences at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He continued his education internationally working in Hamburg and the United States at  the Rockefeller Foundation and ultimately received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in hygiene sciences with a specialty in protozoology. With this kind of medical background and expertise in infectious disease, he was asked to head the newly created Special Directorate of Malariology in his home country of Venezuela in 1936.  He held this post until 1950.

He successfully applied his understanding of the methodologies required to combat infectious disease to the rate and severity of malarial infection that gripped his country in the 1930s.  This included the emphasis on public hygiene and sanitation and the judicious application of anti-malarial drugs. His approach was so successful that mortality resulting from malarial infection was decreased significantly by 1944 and, more importantly, its control was seen as within reach.

This initial success was followed by an attempt to significantly reduce the Anopheles mosquito population.  For this purpose, the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane  (DDT) was used.  The historic data has revealed that “by 1950 the death rate from malaria in the country had been reduced to 9 per 100,000 inhabitants and was eradicated in an area of 132 000 km2. In 1955, 10 years after the program started the rate was lowered to 1 per 100 000 population and the eradicated area had increased to 305,414 km2.” On balance, it should be kept in mind that the discovery of the ecological burden posed by the use of DDT on the natural environment has effectively banned its application for many years.

Gabaldón is also credited with discovering a new species of malarial parasites and had focused a great deal of his efforts on further study of the Anopheles mosquito.  He was later appointed Minister of Health and Welfare between 1959 and 1964 in recognition of his premier understanding regarding issued of public health.  He died in September of 1990.

Arnoldo Gabaldón made a significant contribution to the principles and practices of public health around the area of infectious disease.  The example of his leadership has been emulated throughout the world and possibly has saved countless lives. 

Ann Hutchinson - 1591-1643

Ann Hutchinson was born in England in 1591 and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 inspired by the well-known and influential Puritan leader John Cotton.  She proved to be an outspoken woman with views that severely challenged the male-dominated Puritan community.  She was accused of being an antinomian – an individual that rejects the prevalent Christian notion that strict obedience to the code of religious law(s) is a necessary prerequisite for personal salvation.  For her persistent and unflinching expression of her controversial views, she was ultimately banished by the General Court of Massachusetts and excommunicated from the Church of Boston.

Although it was rare for a woman of her era to be so outspoken, the schism that had occurred in the Puritan movement during the seventeenth century, made it possible for women to participate more fully as lay preachers and take on more activist roles in church leadership.

As was typical for that era, no documents written by Hutchinson remain; however, the court records from her two trials before the General Court (Nov. 1637 and March 1638, respectively) reveal a great deal about the nature of the political, theological and gender-based issues that consumed the Puritan community at that time.

Hutchinson was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, England and had 11 siblings.  Her father, Francis Marbury, was an Anglican clergyman.  On account of her father’s diligence, she was well educated and was well-versed in theology and was taught to openly express her views.  She eventually married and gave birth to twelve children and had her last child in Boston.

Between the years 1636 and 1638, Hutchinson adamantly expressed her antinomian viewpoint during devotional religious meetings finding fault with the teaching of the conventional Puritan ministry of the time as described above.

Following her excommunication from the Church of Boston, the family moved to Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay.  The husband died in 1642 and she moved with her six youngest children to New York where the mother and five of those children were killed in an Indian raid in 1643.

Ann Hutchinson was certainly a woman unafraid to speak her mind and was an activist at a time when women were expected to know their limited place in society.

Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel a survivor of the Jewish extermination camp at Auschwitz and an eloquent spokesman for the horrors of the Holocaust passed away on Saturday July 2, 2016 at the age of 87.  The following is the full text of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Elie Wiesel's Acceptance Speech, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1986

It is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know: your choice transcends me. This both frightens and pleases me.

It frightens me because I wonder: do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? ... I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

It pleases me because I may say that this honor belongs to all the survivors and their children, and through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: "Can this be true?" This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

And now the boy is turning to me: "Tell me," he asks. "What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?"

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my peoples' memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands ... But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much of a disgrace as Josef Biegun's imprisonment. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution, writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. And then, too, there are the Palestinians to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore. Violence and terrorism are not the answer. Something must be done about their suffering, and soon. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.

Yes, I have faith. Faith in God and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all. Isn't this the meaning of Alfred Nobel's legacy? Wasn't his fear of war a shield against war?

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind.

From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1986, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1987

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1986

Orlando 2016 – An Inevitable Outcome of an Armed Citizenry

The horrific massacre that took place in a Gay Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in the early morning hours of Sunday June 12, 2016 is another in a long string of mass killings perpetrated by a heavily armed assailant(s). These assailants are typically mentally disturbed and apparently motivated by a blinding hatred seeking vengeance for supposed wrongs done against them or the group to which they identify.  In this case, the killer, Omar Mateen, was an American citizen of Afghan descent who was a Muslim and supporter of ISIS – the extremist Islamic group.  He was a young man filled with hatred and who legally purchased deadly firearms.

Such events are obviously very unsettling for the general population; for they highlight intense feelings of insecurity – the natural reaction is for individuals to want to protect themselves from such senseless violence.  The gun industry in the United States as represented by the National Rifle Association (NRA) invariably uses such events to encourage ordinary citizens to protect themselves with firearms in a country where by 2009 there were an estimated 310 million firearms owned by American citizens as published in a Congressional Research report.  The updated estimate is that there are more guns in the hands of individuals than the entire population.

In the current political climate demagogues like Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for President, are quick to find a convenient scapegoat focusing on the Muslim population; for, the purpose of exploiting and stoking fear in the minds of those who choose to listen to his invective.  The reality is quite different and far more complex than Mr. Trump would like to suggest.  In fact, hate crimes especially against minorities have been a fact of life in the United States for many, many years.  The African-American community is well aware of this history that began with slavery, continued through the post-Civil War era exemplified by Jim Crow throughout the American South and, of course, manifests itself to this day in many forms including police violence.  Other minorities subjected to discrimination and violence include homosexuals, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans and immigrants. 

It is interesting that those non-Muslims who have been responsible for mass-killings, regardless of their underlying motivation, have not been branded as terrorists.  These events though numerous – as chronicled by the New York Times  - are treated as isolated incidents

In fact, the underlying sense of stability and security that is necessary for a society to sanely function is being undermined by the reality that we have a well-armed citizenry.  The inevitable result of such an environment is that at any moment in any part of this vast country, an individual or group my feel compelled for some reason, inexplicable to most everyone else, to take vengeance upon some perceived threat, despised group or alleged enemy.  As a people, we are paying a heavy price for this blind allegiance to what has been proclaimed as our constitutional right to bear arms as embodied in the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution – some may find it difficult to envision that the framers of the Constitution had the current reality in mind.

I believe we have to ask ourselves as a people, if we really want to continue on this path.  Do we really want to be plagued, on a daily basis, with the fear that ourselves, or our loved ones or our community will be the indiscriminate target of someone’s senseless outrage?  Are we willing to accept these periodic events of mass killings as a natural outcome of our collective choice to be armed with deadly weapons?  If so, then we need to be prepared to accept the onerous psychological price that we are paying for such a choice.  If so, then we should be prepared to endure these disturbing events as a “legitimate” aspect of the national landscape.

Near Extinction of the World’s Largest Primate

The New York Times recently reported that it is now predicted that the so-called, “Grauer’s Gorilla” may soon be extinct as a result of their slaughter at the hands of humans.  This is dreadful news for a number of reasons.  The first of which being that our planet may soon be devoid of a magnificent creature.    There has been a precipitous drop in this gorilla population – 77% in 20 years – leading to merely 3800 survivors at the current time.  Their ultimate disappearance will be due entirely to the human propensity for violence.  It seems that their fate is directly linked to political and economic instability in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

These innocent creatures are being killed primarily for food by rebels residing in the deep jungles of the Congo.  Their presence in this environment appears to be connected to the attempted genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda in 1994.  An estimated 800,000 individuals were killed at that time and many potential victims fled to neighboring Zaire.  Many of those who fled formed into armed militias and chaos quickly spread to the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.  It is estimated that the ensuing violence has led to the death of over 5 million people over the intervening years.

It would be easy to conclude that this disturbing reality is not our fault and not our problem.  After all, we know who the perpetrators are.  However, it is not quite that facile an argument.  This should not be thought of as an isolated event.  It is, after all, human behavior that is responsible – desperate circumstances invariably lead to desperate measures.  All of humanity should be deeply disturbed by this news.  For it is an indicator on the state of existence of mankind and the degree to which we have come to regard violence as normal and the degradation of the natural environment as essentially unavoidable.