A scientist who didn’t “hide the decline”
December 13th, 2009 | by Curious Texan |
On September 28, 1928, a scientist in the laboratory of St. Mary’s Hospital in London noticed that someone had left the lid off of a petri dish containing Staphylococcus plate culture. As a result of someone’s mistake, a blue mould “contaminated” the petri dish, inhibiting the growth of the bacteria.
Had this scientist worked at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where the ClimateGate emails and documents were recently hacked, he might have performed a “trick” (i.e. thrown away the petri dish) in order to “hide the decline” of Staphylococcus bacteria. Fortunately for the human race, this scientist chose instead to investigate why this anomaly occurred, even though it didn’t fit into his preconceived understanding of microbiology.
The scientist was Alexander Fleming. The blue mould, Penicillium, was later developed into penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic.
But that’s not the end of the story. By 1931, Fleming was convinced that penicillin couldn’t last in the human body long enough to kill pathogenic bacteria, and he stopped studying it. Fortunately, two other scientists (Boris Chain and Walter Florey) continued to work on developing penicillin.
Did Fleming threaten the editors of the journals that published Chain and Florey’s work or try to “re-define what the peer-review literature is” (like CRU Director Phil Jones and others did to those whose research contradicted theirs)? On the contrary, Fleming not only allowed the research of Chain and Florey to proceed, he was eventually won over by their findings and himself began working on penicillin again in 1934. In the end, Fleming, Chain and Florey all won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945.
Untold millions of lives have been saved from infections that would have previously been fatal, all because a British scientist dared to put pettiness, ego, and politics aside and follow the scientific evidence to where it ultimately led.
4 Responses to “A scientist who didn’t “hide the decline””
By celtictexan on Jan 4, 2010 | Reply
Fact is if there is no man made global warming crisis, there is no justification for carbon credits. No carbon credits, no finacial windfall for the US government and the UN new world order.
By Curious Texan on Jan 4, 2010 | Reply
You’re right, celtictexan. The whole carbon credit/cap-and-trade scam, if implemented, could indeed be a huge source of federal revenues, as well as a tax base for worldwide re-distribution of wealth through the UN.
But there’s a third entity that stands to gain from from the perpetuation of the global warming crisis - an entity that would surprise and anger many on the Left.
Last July, Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent article in the Rolling Stone entitled “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine” that chronicles every economic bubble that Goldman Sachs has capitalized upon since the 1920’s.
(Here’s a link to the article.)
In the very last paragraph of this article (Section 5 of the online article), Taibbi reveals “what may the biggest and most audacious bubble yet”:
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm’s co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. [Emphasis added]
Al Gore, Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, the developing nations … and Goldman Sachs?
Economics, like politics, make for strange bedfellows.
By celtictexan on Jan 6, 2010 | Reply
You been watching weather around the world? Record cold and snowfall (snowfall, hmm think that might be what the libs mean by riseing water levels?) in China, Korea, England isolated spots here. Funny huh?
By Curious Texan on Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
Funny indeed, celtictexan. Tagesthemen, the German version of ABC News Nightline, started their program a few nights ago with a piece about how cold this winter has been there too. If the summer of 2010 is as mild worldwide as the winter was harsh, I think there will be a lot of climate scientists and politicians with a serious amount of egg on their faces.
In the meantime, the Brits have acknowledged that the scientists at the CRU broke the law under the UK Freedom of Information Act when they didn’t relsease data requested:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246661/New-scandal-Climate-Gate-scientists-accused-hiding-data-global-warming-sceptics.html
More “hiding the decline”? Yep. Will they be prosecuted? Nope.