Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Welcome to "science week" at my humble blog. To begin: the standout in the Nobel Prize awards this year, the one likely most fascinating to observers outside the field itself, is ... Medicine.  This year's award for advances in medicine went to researchers who opened up new vistas in the study of immunity. Immunity, and related matters such as vaccination -- these have been on a lot of minds of non-experts since the Covid epidemic, and even more intensely since a rogue member of the Kennedy family became the US Secretary of Health. The apotheosis of the non-expert.    The Nobel Prize winners were rewarded for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Breaking that down a bit: "immune tolerance" means simply that our immune systems tolerate our own tissue.  The system doesn't go after our own tissue in the ways it goes after foreign matter. So ... anyone who doesn't have an autoimmune disorder such as lupus or multiple sclerosis by definit...

 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year went to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan. Apparently, they independently discovered a new more efficient way of linking molecules to each other, creating new synthetic chemicals.  The new way is called "asymmetric organocatalysis." It means -- well, I'm not very sure what it means. A member of the chemistry Nobel committee explains why it has mattered. "This new toolbox is used widely today, for example in drug discovery, and in fine chemicals production and is already benefitting humankind greatly."  Drug discovery. Hmmm. Is this the Nobel Committee's indirect way of congratulating the researchers toiling in the field of Covid vaccine and treatment? Another question comes to mind, concerning List. News reports say that he is "professor at and director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research." What a name? Max Planck was a subatomic physicist, wasn't he? Did he do any "coal research"...

  Microbe Hunters was the title of a wonderfully successful science-popularzing book written by Paul de Kruif and published by Simon & Schuster in 1926.  The book is on its face a set of capsule biographies of prominent biologists from Leeuwenhook to Paul Ehrlich. Leeuwenhook invented the microscope: Ehrlich found a cure for syphilis in 1909.  But de Kruif had an underlying organizing principle by which he made his selection. The book was about the pragmatic successes of the germ theory of disease. Specifically, a 'typical' disease has one cause, and the cause is usually a germ. The way to cure (or immunize people from) a disease is to find the germ that causes it, then either(a) find a way to kill that microbe without doing damage to the surrounding tissue (a "magic bullet" as Ehrlich called such a discovery) or find a way to assist the body's own immune system in doing the same. Hence, the title of the book.  The only character in the book to get two chapter...