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Pandemnics

3/27/2020

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A pandemic [from Greek meaning "all" and "people"] is a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of infected people is not a pandemic.
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The bacteria and viruses causing pandemic diseases are nothing new. They’ve been stalking human beings for at least 5,000 years. Scientists believe that finding bacteria in human skeletons bones 4,900 years old indicates that humans became sick and died because of virulent diseases for thousands of years before there was any historical or archaeological evidence of epidemics.
DNA from teeth in seven human skeletons 4,500-year-old shows that plague struck Bronze Age peoples in Europe and Asia. ​Photo Credit: Harri Moora - Photo Source: sciencenewsforstudents.org

When the press and medical professionals began referring to COVID-19 as a Pandemic, I thought of our current situation as unprecedented and believed this point in history to be unique. And it is, in a way, if only because the exact set of circumstances never occur twice. After I started researching this blog, I realized how often in history human beings have faced similar events.

And still, the human race survives. It’s hard, if not impossible, to put a current event into proper perspective. Just remember, all of the numbers being thrown around are estimates and not precise for a lot of reasons.


A PANDEMIC OF EPIDEMICS
While the details of what constitutes an epidemic vs. a pandemic may be a matter of interpretation or opinion, history began recording these mass infections from diseases before Christ. Which of the many pandemics are the “worst” is debatable, depending on the criteria used.

3,000 BC       Bronze Age Epidemics
                     
Death toll: Unknown:
                      Causes: Unknown
[Probably Bubonic Plague]
Scientists have found the plague strains [I assume the sources refer to Bubonic Plague] in the Bronze age were similar to the bacteria guilty of later pandemics, but believe they were less virulent and less transmissible in the ancient past. Still, this period in history experienced sudden mass migrations, and some theorize the movement resulted from epidemics of disease. Based on the map, it seems the Bronze Age migration was from the steppes of Russia to the west and south.             Map source: nature.com/news/bronze-age-skeletons

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430-427 BC        The Plague at Athens
                           
Death Toll: 100,000
                            Cause: Smallpox [most likely], possibly by typhus or bubonic plague.
In the 2nd year of the Peloponnesian War, 430 BCE, an outbreak of plague erupted in Athens and spread throughout scattered parts of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean until finally dying out in 426 BCE. The origin of the epidemic occurred in sub-Saharan Africa just south of Ethiopia.

165 AD                 The Antonine Plague
                              Death Toll: 5 million
                              Cause: Unknown; thought to be either smallpox or measles
The Antonine Plague, brought by Roman soldiers returning from Mesopotamia, affected Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, and Italy.

165 AD                 Plague of Justinian
                             Death Toll: 25 million
                             Cause: Bubonic Plague
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The Plague of Justinian is the first documented outbreak of the bubonic plague, afflicting the Byzantine Empire and Mediterranean port cities and killing up to 25 million people [estimated at half the population of Europe]. At its worst, an estimated number of deaths reached 5,000 people per day, including forty percent of the population of Constantinople. It is said to have ended because there was no one left to die.
Photo source: wileyearthpages.wordpress.com/Justinian

1346-1353           The Black Death
                            
Death Toll: 75 – 200 million
                             Cause: Bubonic Plague
The Bubonic Plague [often called The Black Death] ran rampant in Europe, Africa, and Asia from 1346 to 1353. Believed to have originated in Asia, the disease was spread by a bacillus called “Yersina pestis” [discovered at the end of the 19th century], which lived on the rat fleas and rats thriving on ships. Today scientists know the bacillus can travel from person to person through the air, as well as through the bit of infected fleas or rats. Both of these pests could be found almost anywhere in medieval Europe. 
Flea infected with Yersinia pestis - Photo source: commons.wikimedia.org/Flea_yersinia

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Although the Bubonic plague never went away completely after the Justinian plague, it only existed on a local or regional scale. The plague arrived in Europe a second time in 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Most of the sailors were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. By the time the situation was discovered, it was too late and the disease spread rampant throughout Europe, killing half the population.

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Without understanding the science, people soon learned that infection had to do with proximity, and port cities were worst hit. The Venetians, a sea-faring people, decided to keep the crews of newly arrived ships in quarantine until it was proved they were not sick. Initially, officials kept sailors on their ships for thirty days, then lengthened the time to forty days... a quarantino. This practice slowed the rapid progress of the illness and is the origin of the word and concept of quarantine in English.
Photo source: historic-uk.com/HistoryUK

1665 AD              The Great Plague of London
                            
Death Toll: 100,000
                             Cause: Bubonic Plague
London never really squelched the Bubonic plague. Between 1346 and 1665 epidemics hit London about every twenty years – forty outbreaks in three hundred years – each episode killing off twenty percent of the population. Around 1500, England imposed laws to isolate the sick.

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According to History.com:
“Homes stricken by plague were marked with a bale of hay strung to a pole outside. If you had infected family members, you had to carry a white pole when you went out in public. Cats and dogs were believed to carry the disease, so there was a wholesale massacre of hundreds of thousands of animals.”
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London street scene, Great Plague of 1665 - Photo credit: The Print Collector/Getty Images
Photo source: history.com/news/plague and openhistorysociety.org
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The worst was saved for last. The Great Plague in 1665 killed 100,000 in seven months. Victims were forcibly confined to their homes, and nearly everything else closed down. Bodies were buried in mass graves. Harsh, indeed, but the actions helped bring the plague to an end.

1500 to 1800        Smallpox in the New World
                             
Death toll: 10 million plus                                                                 
Podcast Episodes » #48: 
                              Cause: Smallpox                                                                            Photo source: historyonthenet.com/48
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​Smallpox is a disease which has been around a long time in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, no doubt causing ongoing epidemics, some of major proportions. When the Europeans carried the virus to the new world in the 15th century, the native people of North and South America had no natural immunity. Smallpox wiped out tens of millions, an estimated ninety-five percent of the native population in one hundred years.
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In the late 18th century, British Doctor Edward Jenner developed a treatment which resulted in smallpox being the first virus epidemic ended by a vaccine.

1852 to 1860      Third Cholera Pandemic
                           
Death toll: One million
                            Cause: Cholera

The 1852-1860 pandemic of Cholera was the worst of seven outbreaks. The pandemic started in India and spread through Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa. In 1854, a British physician John Snow discovered that contaminated water was the manner in which the disease was transmitted.

1899-1923           Sixth Cholera Pandemic
                            Death toll: 1.5 million [800,000 in India, 11 in US]
                            Cause: Cholera

By the sixth world Cholera pandemic, medical science and public health had advanced enough in the US and Western Europe to keep outbreaks in those counties at a minimum. This episode began, as most others, in India [where it killed 800,000 people] and then spread to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Russia.

​Only eleven people died in the US during this last outbreak, when the steamship Moltke brought infected people from Naples to New York City. The infected were quarantined on an island until they were cured or not infected. However, the quarantine reinforced the perception that all immigrants carried diseases and should be kept out.

1918-1920           Influenza Pandemic
                            Death toll: 20 to 50 million
                            Cause: Influenza
Between 1918 and 1920 a disturbingly deadly outbreak of influenza tore across the globe, infecting over a third of the world’s population and ending the lives of 20 to 50 million people. Of the 500 million people infected in the 1918 pandemic, the mortality rate was estimated at 10% to 20%, with up to 25 million deaths in the first 25 weeks alone. What separated the 1918 flu pandemic from other influenza outbreaks was the victims -- where influenza had always previously only killed juveniles, the elderly, or already weakened patients -- it had begun striking down hardy and completely healthy young adults, while leaving children and those with weaker immune systems still alive.

1918-1919           Spanish Flu Pandemic
                           
Death toll: 50 million [675,000 in USA]
                            Cause: Influenza

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Spanish Flu was a virus, of bird origin, which infected 500 million people [a third of the world’s population], but the exact origin was never determined. Particularly virulent, the infection caused liquid-filled lungs, severe pneumonia, and lung tissue inflammation. In 2005, research showed it as “a uniquely deadly product of nature, evolution, and the intermingling of people and animals.”
Victims of Spanish flu at a barracks hospital, Fort Collins, CO 1918.
Photo credits: American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Photo source: history.com/news/spanish-flu


1956-1958           Asian Flu
                           
Death toll: 1 to 2 Million [116,000 in US]
                            Cause: Influenza
A new flu virus [Avian] originating in Guizhou China, traveled to Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and then the United States. This virus was a mixed species strain of the previous flu virus; a mutation of the avian virus in wild ducks combining with a pre-existing human strain of the virus. A vaccine was available in 1957. After ten years of evolution, the Asian flu virus disappeared and a new subtype appeared which led to the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968.
 

1968                     Hong Kong Flu Pandemic
                            
Death toll: One million [100,000 in US - mostly elderly]
                             Cause: Influenza
From the first reported case on July 13, 1968 in Hong Kong. In slightly over two weeks, there were cases found in Singapore and Vietnam. In three months, the flu had spread to the Philippines, India, Australia, Europe, and the US. Even though the mortality rate was only 0.5%, the illness resulted in a death toll of one million.

2005-2012           Hiv/Aids Pandemic
Peak                    Death toll: 36 million
                            Cause: HIV/ AIDS
“First identified in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1976, HIV/AIDS has truly proven itself as a global pandemic, killing more than 36 million people since 1981. Currently there are between 31 and 35 million people living with HIV, the vast majority of those are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 5% of the population is infected, roughly 21 million people. As awareness has grown, new treatments have been developed that make HIV far more manageable, and many of those infected go on to lead productive lives. Between 2005 and 2012 the annual global deaths from HIV/AIDS dropped from 2.2 million to 1.6 million.” https://www.mphonline.org/worst-pandemics-in-history/

2013-2016           Ebola Virus Epidemic
                           
Death toll: 11,323 (West Africa)
                            Cause: Viral Haemorrhagic Fever
Ebola is a virus disease known as haemorrhagic fever. The virus is spread through direct contact with body fluids, or items recently contaminated with body fluids. It was identified in 1976 when there were two simultaneous outbreaks in Africa. Symptoms show two days to three weeks after contacting and include fever, sore throat, muscular pain, vomiting, diarrhea and rash. Between the first outbreak in 1976 and the beginning of the epidemic of 2013-2016 there had been 2,387 cases and 1,590 deaths.The most recent epidemic in West Africa reported 28,646 cases and 11,323 deaths.

THE CORONAVIRUS
This is not a new disease. There are many viruses categorized as coronavirus. It was first discovered in 1930 in domestic poultry. Only seven of the coronaviruses cause disease in humans.

The good news: Four of the seven viruses only result in the symptoms of the common cold. On occasion, they cause respiratory tract infections, including pneumonia in infants and older people.

The bad news: Three of the seven can be severe and deadly.

​2002                     SARS
                            
Death toll: 774
                             Cause: Coronavirus
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is a virus which results in respiratory disease. It is a zoonotic illness which is caused by germs that spread between animals and humans, and originated in Guangdong Province of China. Scientists eventually discovered the virus carried through civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats.

   Civet - Photo source: en.wikipedia.org/Civet                  Horseshoe bat - Photo source: www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

2012                     MERS
                            
Death toll: 858
                             Cause: Coronavirus
The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome is also a strain of the Coronavirus which emerged in 2012. Studies implicate dromedary camels as the most likely origin. Physical contact with the saliva of infected camel and drinking milk from infected camels is the suspect transmission route for inflecting humans. Most of the cases, and deaths, were in Saudi Arabia, but the virus did spread to other middle eastern countries. There were only two cases in the US and no deaths.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_outbreakpr

2019-?                 COVID-19
                            
Death toll: 108,312 worldwide / 515 US
                             Estimated cases: 417,663 worldwide / 42,000 US
                             Cause: Coronavirus

SHOULD WE PANIC YET?
As pandemics have gone on the planet earth, COVID-19 doesn’t sound like the most serious in history if you look at death tolls. 
Keep in mind that the COVID-19 numbers change hourly right now. 

Panic? No. Take it seriously? Absolutely.

Of course, the count isn’t in yet, but I’ll stick my neck out and guess that it will be less than a million worldwide. But wait! A million is still a lot of people. We don’t want that!

My Observations
World pandemics have become more frequent in the last hundred and fifty years or so. Contemporary travel and communications have changed the equation, and population, as well as population densities, have increased dramatically nearly everywhere, encroaching on the habitat of wild animals who originate the diseases.

The world is better prepared to face a super-virulent virus today than it was a century ago, but in general we are not well prepared to handle potential increases and severity of pandemics. I found several pre-2019 that predicted another outbreak of coronavirus. If health officials reacted at all, it wasn't enough.
​
So, yes, COVID-19 is a unique “first-time-in-history” event which I see moving along on two parallel [for the moment] tracks … the health/disease control track and the political track.

I trust the health/disease track to move forward with vaccines and treatments for this particular virus and take steps for handle the next mutation of bacterial and viral disease with better preparation. Fortunately, science comes through sooner or later. 
We just need to listen to the scientists.

However, the manner in which this pandemic is handled politically and the interaction of many countries in the world could well direct significant future events history.

I’m sorry I won’t be around to see what happens in the long term.
□ 
Sources:
http://news.discovery.com/human/health/10-worst-epidemics-130917.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cholera-s-seven-pandemics-1.758504
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3867475/
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2027479,00.html
http://www.infoplease.com/cig/dangerous-diseases-epidemics/bubonic-plague.html
http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/surveillance/plague.pdf
http://healthvermont.gov/prevent/Plague.aspx
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/black_death_of_1348_to_1350.htm
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1996-7/Smith.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/health/01plague.html?_r=0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4381924.stm
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1996-7/Smith.html
http://www.infoplease.com/cig/dangerous-diseases-epidemics/smallpox-12000-years-terror.html
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs360/en/index.html
http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/
http://www.history.com/topics/1918-flu-pandemic
http://www.infoplease.com/cig/dangerous-diseases-epidemics/smallpox-12000-years-terror.html
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-088815/en/
https://www.ancient.eu/article/939/the-plague-at-athens-430-427-bce/
https://www.openhistorysociety.org/members-articles/the-great-plague-of-london-1665/
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Great-Plague/
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/earliest-evidence-plague
https://www.who.int/cholera/the-forgotten-pandemic/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1846%E2%80%931860_cholera_pandemic
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurgence
https://www.historyonthenet.com/48-native-americans-resistant-old-world-diseases-different-new-world
https://zidbits.com/2011/01/why-didnt-europeans-get-wiped-out-by-native-americans-diseases/
https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/infectious-diseases/respiratory-viruses/coronaviruses-and-acute-respiratory-syndromes-covid-19,-mers,-and-sars
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.htmlhttps://www.nature.com/news/bronze-age-skeletons-were-earliest-plague-victims-1.18633
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/pandemics-timeline
https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-mortality-rate-covid-19-fatalities-ebola-sars-mers-1489466
https://www.ft.com/content/8521d81e-1c0f-11ea-81f0-0c253907d3e0
 
 
 
 


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Women's History Month: Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet and Writer

3/22/2020

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Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, the first black woman to hold a position as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and was the poet laureate of the State of Illinois. She frequently wrote about the struggle for racial equality in the US, which received harsh criticism at the time.
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Brooks is recognized as “one of the most highly regarded, highly influential” poets of the 20th-century.

EARLY LIFE
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1917. Her father was a janitor for a music company, but had hoped to pursue a career as a doctor. Her mother was a school teacher as well as a concert pianist trained in classical music. When Brooks was still a baby, her parents moved to Chicago, where she lived the rest of her life.
Brooks wrote from an early age and, encouraged by her mother, she began submitting poems to publications as a teen. At thirteen, her first published poem entitled “Eventide” appeared in American Childhood magazine. Over the next four years she wrote and published seventy-five poems.
▼Photo source: poeticous.com/gwendolyn-brooks

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By her graduation from high school in 1935, Brooks submitted to and was published by The Chicago Defender. During her education she suffered a great deal of racial discrimination, and drew on these experiences and the insight she gained in her writing. She never pursued a college degree because she felt it unnecessary to a career in writing.

"I am not a scholar," she later said. "I'm just a writer who loves to write and will always write."


Brooks did attend Wilson Junior College for a two-year program and found work as a typist to support herself while she pursued her writing. She did admit that she would have written differently had she remained in Kansas. While attending meetings of the Chicago’s NAACP, Brooks met Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. They married in 1939, and subsequently had two children.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER
Pursing her writing career, Brooks attended poetry and writing workshops, one of which was visited by poet Langston Hughes who heard her read her work. In 1944 two of her poems were published in Poetry magazine. She was a hit, and a year later her first book of poetry, A street in Bronzeville, was published by Harper & Brothers. 


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nnie Allen, Brooks’ second book of poetry was published in 1949. Her work depicted the life of a young Black girl growing up in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago and won critical acclaim “for its authentic and textured portraits of life.” She won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize and Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize for this book. She was the first African American author to win a Pulitzer Prize. Brooks’ first and only narrative novel, Maud Martha, as published in 1953. The novel follows the life of a black woman named Maud Martha Brown.                                                                                      Brooks holding copy of  her first book ►
                                                                                                                                        Photo source: pulitzer.org/article/brooks      During her lifetime, Brooks wrote a large body of work, but she was also acclaimed as a teacher. Author Frank London Brown asked her to teach a course in American literature at the University of Chicago. This was her first teaching experience and the beginning of an extensive, lifelong commitment to sharing poetry and teaching writing.

HONORS
  • 1946, Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
  • 1950, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
  • 1968, appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000
  • 1969, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
  • 1976, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • 1976, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
  • 1985, selected as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an honorary one-year term, known as the Poet Laureate of the United States
  • 1988, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame
  • 1989, awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America
  • 1994, chosen to present the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture.
  • 1994, received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
  • 1995, presented with the National Medal of Arts
  • 1997, awarded the Order of Lincoln, the highest honor granted by the State of Illinois.
  • 1999, awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement.
Source of List of Honors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks

FROST, WILLIAMS OUT; BROOKS, IN: THE PULITZER PRIZE STORY
According to pulitzer.org/article/frost-williams-no, the story behind the story of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry is worth commenting on.

The judges for 1950 Advisory Committee were Alfred Kreymborg [a poet, anthologist and chess master who had long been a figure in the New York literary scene], Louis Untermeyer, and Henry Seidel Canby [a noted English professor at Yale]. All had served on the jury previously.

“The jury that year faced some challenges. William Carlos Williams, long a friend and colleague of Kreymborg’s, had published both a Selected Poems and the first parts of Paterson in 1949. He was in his mid-60s and had never won a Pulitzer Prize. Robert Frost’s Complete Poems came out that year as well. He was 75 and had won the prize four times. His friend, Louis Untermeyer, was on the jury with Kreymborg.” https://www.pulitzer.org/article/frost-williams-no-gwendolyn-brooks

Alfred Kreymborg - Photo:             Henry Seidel Canby        Louis Untermeyer - Photo
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bolsteredbythoughts.weebly.com/    jnjreid.com/canby         dcwritershomes.wdchumanities.org

The jury of three had eleven books to review. Ultimately, they decided that although the best book of the year was Robert Frost’s Complete Poems, Frost had received the award four times for all but a few of the same poems. A fifth prize would be redundant and unfair.

William Carlos Williams had been growing in stature but was still “…frequently distinguished by an extreme of obscurity.” Later in 1950, Williams was due to publish a volume of poetry which the judges believed would be more representative of his talent, and felt that the next year would give the jury better material for form a judgment. The only other book worthy of consideration was Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks. After explaining the above in a letter to Dean Carl W. Ackerman, Graduate School of Journalism Columbia University, Henry S. Canby wrote:

“Fortunately, among the other books of poems submitted for an award is a volume of great originality, real distinction and high value as a book, as well as poetry. Some years ago, Gwendolyn Brooks, a Negro writer of unusual ability, published A Street in Bronzeville, which made a great impression on all its readers and had what is unusual for poetry today — a wide sale. In 1949 she published Annie Allen, a much better book, and indeed, in our opinion, the outstanding volume of the year, if you exclude Robert Frost. No other Negro poet has written such poetry of her own race, of her own experiences, subjective and objective, and with no grievance or racial criticism as the purpose of her poetry. It is highly skillful and strong poetry, out of the heart, but rich with racial experience. I quote from Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, with whose opinion I entirely agree.

I may say that we have seldom been more satisfied than with our choice of Annie Allen.
        Yours very truly,
        Henry S. Canby
”
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Note: The other books considered for the 1950 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry include:
Orpheus, Muriel Rukeyser
Elegies, Muriel Rukeyser
An Acre in the Seed (posthumous), Theodore Spencer
Live Another Day, John Ciardi
Aspects of Proteus, Hyam Plutzik
Volume II, Jose Garcia Villa
Walk Through Two Landscapes, Dilys Bennett Laing
The Tears of the Blind Lions, Thomas Merton


The Pulizer Prize kicked off Brooks prolific career with a bang. 

Sources:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gwendolyn-brooks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/brooks/life.htm
https://www.pulitzer.org/article/frost-williams-no-gwendolyn-brooks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks#Career
https://poetryteatime.com/blog/learn-about-gwendolyn-brooks
https://blackbooksmatter.com/celebrating-gwendolyn-brooks/
https://www.poeticous.com/gwendolyn-brooks



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Women's History Month: Where is Henrietta When We Need Her?

3/14/2020

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​THE 20th CENTURY IMMORTAL WOMAN
With all the attention directed toward the corona virus and importance of medical research finding a vaccine and treatment options for the illness, you would think the public would have heard, at least in passing, about Henrietta Lacks, The Immortal Woman.

No, really. She is immortal, although not in the same sense as superheros in graphic novels. Not even like some of the women we write about during Women’s History Month whose names will live seemingly forever.
​
Yet, because of Henrietta Lacks’ “immortality” she must have saved thousands of lives -- maybe millions – since she died in 1951. For some twenty years no one knew about her or her far reaching contribution to medical research.

EVERYONE HAS A BACK STORY
Henrietta Lacks, born Loretta Pleasant (August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an African-American tobacco farmer born in Roanoke, Virginia. I didn’t find out how her name got changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but everyone called her Hennie (or Henny).

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Her mother died when Loretta was four, and she and her nine brothers and sisters were parceled out to be raised by relatives. She grew up with her grandfather and a cousin, whom she later married. Like every human being, Lacks has a back story – her life growing up, maturing, starting her own family – and there is nothing remarkable about it.

Fast Forward.                                                                                                                          

▲Loretta Pleasant as a child                                                                                                                                ▼ Henrietta and David “Day” Lacks
Photo Source: sutori.com/item/1920-henrietta-Lacks                                                                 Photo Source: facebook.com/afrigeneas/
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A SIGNIFICANT BUT UNHERALDED CONTRIBUTION
January, 1951, Lacks went to the Johns Hopkins, the only hospital in the area that treated black patients, because she felt a "knot" in her womb. She was pregnant, but after the birth of her fifth child she suffered from severe hemorrhage due to a mass on her cervix.

Lacks’ doctor at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Howard W. Jones, took a biopsy of the mass for laboratory testing. She was diagnosed as having cancer of the cervix and was treated. During those treatments, doctors took tissue samples from the malignant carcinoma and from the healthy tissue without Lacks’ knowledge or permission, which was legal standard practice at that time.
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Henrietta Lacks died of uremic poisoning as a result of cancer on October 4, 1951. She was thirty-one years old.

Her cell samples made their way through the system and randomly ended up with George Otto Gey, a physician and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins. The cells from the cancerous sample eventually became known as the HeLa immortal cell line, coded with the first two letters of the first and last names, a commonly used cell line in contemporary biomedical research. No one knew the name of the cell donor.

THE CELLS THAT WOULDN’T DIE
Human cells are essential to biological research but, in the fifties, culturing human cells took a long time and a lot of effort, plus most of those cells could only stay alive for one or two days or multiply only a few times once removed from the body. This limited the research scientists could do.

Instead, Gey discovered that the cells from Lacks’ tumor did not die and could be multiplied perpetually. Because of that, he was able to develop a cell line.


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These cells were the first human, lab-grown cells that were naturally “immortal”, meaning they do not die after a set number of cell divisions. They could be used for conducting a multitude of medical experiments—if the cells died, they could simply be discarded and the experiment attempted again on fresh cells from the culture. This was a gigantic step forward in medical research.
Photo source: npr.org/2010/henrietta-lacks

THE CONNECTION
Henrietta Lacks’ body produced cells so prolific that they still live and regenerate in laboratories nearly six decades after her death. Scientists have grown an estimated 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells, and there are almost 11,000 patents involving these cells.

Today, many different HeLa cell lines continue to mutate in cell cultures, “but all HeLa cells are descended from the same tumor cells removed from Henrietta Lacks.”
​
HeLa cells enabled the growth of polio virus, allowing Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio in 1952. In 1953, HeLa cells were the first human cells to be cloned successfully. In fact, Henrietta Lacks’ cell line has enabled development of vaccines, in vitro fertilization, cloning, AIDs research, and gene mapping, to mention only a few.

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Will Henrietta Lacks come to our rescue once again?

I found a number of current articles about Corona virus research that reference using HeLa cells in the search for a vaccine. A century after her death, perhaps the general public will learn about her invaluable contribution to medical and biochemical research.

A SECOND CONTRIBUTION
Lacks’ contribution goes beyond the medical successes. Her story eventually brought to the attention of the scientific world and the courts to the issue of balance between scientific research and the rights of individuals.

The Lacks family never knew anything about the cell line until 1975 when members were contacted by researchers asking for cell samples from other members of the family. Although Dr. Gey freely shared his research and the cell line with other scientists and researchers, and Johns Hopkins never filed for a patent or received any gain from the cells, eventually the cell line was commercialized and led to many discoveries. The Lacks family never shared in any of the proceeds.

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot (2010) turned the spotlight on the situation, and “organizations that have profited from HeLa have since publicly recognized Henrietta Lacks' contributions to research. The Lacks family has been honored at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Foundation for Cancer Research.” biography.com/scientist/henrietta-lacks

Author Skloot founded the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which provides scholarship assistance to Lacks' descendents, paying the college tuition for five of Lacks' grandchildren and great-grandchildren, several of whom have gone into science. Last but not least, the Foundation helps the Lacks family with medical bills.

“One of the great ironies of the Lacks family's struggles is that, despite her being responsible for landmark medical discoveries, many of her descendents have no health insurance.”
roanoke.com/archive/the-story-of-hela

 
 
Sources:
http://listverse.com/2018/09/08/10-incredible-women-forgotten-by-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
https://www.theatlantavoice.com/articles/celebrate-black-history-month-henrietta-Lacks-Lacks-stolen-cells-revolutionized-medical-research/
https://www.facebook.com/afrigeneas/posts/10154233920602975/
https://www.roanoke.com/archive/the-story-of-hela-roanoke-native-and-scientific-marvel-henrietta/article_a30affe0-25c7-54ad-8176-d64954408ae7.html
https://www.biography.com/scientist/henrietta-Lacks
https://www.sutori.com/item/1920-henrietta-Lacks-was-born-loretta-pleasant-on-august-1-1920-at-some-point
https://blacksthen.com/something-didnt-learn-school-true-story-henrietta-Lacks-video/
https://web.archive.org/web/20011201201650/http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/07.19/04-filmmaker.html
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/03/105351/womens-history-month-famous-females
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks/index.html
http://henriettalacksfoundation.org/
http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/
https://www.npr.org/2010/12/13/132030076/henrietta-lacks-immortal-cells-live-on-in-labs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3341241/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5165181/
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1004502

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WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH: ada Lovelace

3/6/2020

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WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH
March is here and it’s time to share stories about women who have made a difference in our world. On one hand, I’m grateful there is a month when we acknowledge women’s contributions; on the other, I would like to be in a world where everyone’s contributions are honored by everyone, and there is no need to distinguish those people by some artificial grouping. That world will come, but not in my lifetime.
Today I want to draw attention to a woman who thinking was a hundred years ahead of her time, and you may or may not have ever heard of.


ADA BYRON LOVELACE
Ada Lovelace -- born Augusta Ada Byron (1815); died Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1852) -- is considered by much of the computer science profession, as the world's first computer programmer and the first person to recognize the full potential of a computing machine.

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Lovelace wrote the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computing machine developed by Charles Babbage, that existed only on paper. Of course, someone had to be the first, but Lovelace was a woman, and this was in the 1840s.
​

Ada Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician, thanks in part to opportunities that were denied most women of the time, but credit for her significant insights were played down, then forgotten, by the male-dominated world of mathematics and computing. Her contributions have been recognized only recently. Better late than never.
​
Photo: Alfred Edward Chalon / Science Museum Group-Photo source:  https://inews.co.uk/ada-lovelace-day and https://www.biography.com/scholar/ada-lovelace

​A VERY INTERESTING WOMEN
Her achievements in computer programming are not the only interesting things about Ada Lovelace.

She was born Augusta Ada Byron, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle (called Annabella) Noel Milbanke. Lord Byron expected a boy and was disappointed the child was of the female persuasion.
Ada was named after Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and he called her Ada … but not for very long. The marriage ended about two months after Ada was born. Lord Byron left England shortly after that, and Ada, his only legitimate offspring, had no contact with him during her lifetime.
​
Ada was eight years old when he died, and never even saw a portrait of him until her 21st birthday.

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Ada Byron, age four–artist unknown     Age seven, by Alfred d'Orsay, 1822         Ada Byron, age seventeen, 1832      Poet Lord George Gordon Noel Byron
 commons.wikimedia.org/19076847         en.wikipedia.org/Ada_Lovelace 7         en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace      
newworldencyclopedia.org/Byron

Lord Byron must have left Annabella with “a bad taste in her mouth” for romantic poets, because she did everything possible to make her daughter Ada as unlike her poetical father as she could. Lady Byron herself had mathematical training -- Byron had called his wife his Princess of Parallelograms – and she made sure Ada had extensive education in mathematics, logic, and music, the disciplines Annabella considered necessary to divert dangerous poetic tendencies … which Lady Byron considered “insane”.

Although Ada and Lady Byron shared a love of mathematics, she and her mother were never close, and she was raised primarily by her maternal grandmother, who doted on her.
Despite suffering poor health during her childhood and being bed-ridden for a year, Lovelace diligently pursued her study of mathematics. At twelve she designed a sophisticated flying machine powered by steam.
Her late teens were busy eventful years (1833-1835). Ada had an affair with her tutor and tried to elope, but was recognized and returned to her mother who hushed up the disgrace. The same year, her friend, Mary Somerville, introduced her to Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He found her mind brilliant, and they formed a lifelong friendship during which they wrote long letters about mathematics, logic, and his plans to build a difference machine, a kind of calculator.
Having been raised in an elite London society, Ada was introduced to court, and by 1834 she had become a regular there. She charmed everyone, impressed them with her brilliant mind, and had an impressive circle of acquaintances including Charles Dickens, and Michael Faraday.
In 1835, Ada married William King-Noel, and had three children, born in 1836, 1837, and 1839. She suffered from illness after the second child. Three years later, King inherited a noble title, and the couple became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. The family and its fortunes were very much directed by the domineering Lady Byron, to which William-King raised no opposition
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​A VISIONARY A HUNDRED YEARS AHEAD OF HER TIME
In the mean time, Lovelace’s friend Babbage abandoned the construction of his difference machine in favor of a more advanced idea for an Analytical Engine. He found financial support from Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea for his new project. In 1842, Menabrea published a paper in French on the subject of the engine. Babbage recruited his friend Ada to translate the document.                                                    Charles Babbage, Father of Computers
                                                                                                                  Photo source: britannica.com/biography/C-Babbage

She spent nine intense months during 1842-1843 translating the paper and appending a set of her own notes containing a detailed description of how the proposed Analytrical Engine could be programmed to compute Bernoulli numbers. Her addendum -- Ada’s claim to fame -- was three time longer than the paper itself.
 
Unfortunately, the men of mathematics and history have spent a lot of time trying to discredit her and minimize her contribution. As late as 1990, Allan G. Bromley, in his article Difference and Analytical Engines, states “
     “Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so”

According to the Doron Swade, museum curator and author, specializing in Babbage and the history of computing, writes,
     “In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number...What Lovelace saw—what Ada Byron saw—was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules.
     It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation—to general-purpose computation—and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper.”


​Even critics of the “Ada Lovelace, world's-first-computer-programmer claim” seem to agree that she was the only person of the time to foresee the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities, the evolution from number crunching device (a calculator) to a general purpose computer.
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THE FATE OF THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE
Due to lack of funding, Babbage never completed the building of the Analytical Engine, but the design is considered by historians as the first general purpose computer. A portion of the machine was completed in 1910 by Babbage’s son Henry, and it was able to perform basic calculations as designed.

Trial model of a part of the Analytical Engine, built by Babbage, as displayed at the Science Museum (London)
Photo source:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine

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​THE FATE OF ADA LOVELACE
Apparently, after that, Ada continued her life as a countess, a mother, and a student of mathematics, phrenology and mesmerism, along with a number of flirtations and a compulsive gambling habit. Some sources say she was addicted to drugs also.

n 1851, she formed a syndicate and attempted to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. The failure of this venture left her in debt to the syndicate, and she had to fess up to her husband. Presumably, he paid her debts, but no source I used commented on that. However, from the looks of their home, her husband probably had enough pocket money.      
East Horsley, home of Ada, Countess of Lovelace
​                                                                                                                                                                           
Photo source: https://zenpundit.com/?p=4375

In 1852, after a few months of illness, Ada Lovelace died at the age of thirty-six – the same age as her father when he died – from uterine cancer. She was buried next to her father, at her request, in Huckinall, Nottinghamshire at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

HOW SHE IS REMEMBERED
Despite the controversy about the mathematical ability of the Countess of Lovelace, her contributions and foresight have made a difference in the world. After all, Babbage himself referred to her as the "Enchantress of Numbers.”
She is remembered and honored in many ways, although the acknowledgement is late in coming. I believe that in the future she will still be a person of importance in the computing field.

● Ada Lovelace Award: Created in 1981 by the Association for Women in Computing.
● Lovelace Medal: Awarded by the British Computer Society (BCS) since.1998. This organization has also initiated an annual competition for women students.
● Lovelace Colloquium: BCS sponsored conference for women undergraduates.
● Ada College: A college in Tottenham Hale, London, focusing on computer skills.
● Ada Lovelace Day: Second Tuesday of October, begun in 2009 by the women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) "... raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths," and to "create new role models for girls and women" in these fields.
● National Ada Lovelace Day: On 27 July 2018, Senator Ron Wyden submitted, in the US Senate, the designation of 9 October 2018 as National Ada Lovelace Day: "To honor the life and contributions of Ada Lovelace as a leading woman in science and mathematics". The resolution (S.Res.592) was considered, and agreed to without amendment and with a preamble by unanimous consent
● Ada Developers Academy: A non-profit academy in Seattle, Washington, seeking to increase diversity in technology by training women, trans, and non-binary people to be software engineer.
● US Department of Defense Computer Language (ADA): The computer language was named after Ada Lovelace, and the reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980 and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, MIL-STD-1815, was given the number of the year of her birth.
● The Ada Byron Building: The Engineering in Computer Science and Telecommunications College building in Zaragoza University.

NOW HERE’S THE THING
Without getting into all the details of why Ada Lovelace could or could not write the World’s first computer program, here are my points.

● Practically no one makes a significant advancement strictly on their own. Most of the time more than one person is involved, and the advancement is based on the work someone did before.

● Nowhere in my research did I find reference to what Charles Babbage thought about Ada Lovelace’s mathematical ability to take his idea a step further. Granted, it was probably not an issue with anyone at the time, but Babbage did respect her talent and ideas. He called her the Enchantress of Numbers. He must have had enough confidence in Lovelace to ask for her help to translate a complex mathematically-based, technical paper. Doesn’t that count for something in her favor?

I don’t like most TV commercials, but there is one I appreciate.
Question to a woman on a motorcycle: “Isn’t it hard to compete in a man’s world?”
Answer: “Maybe for the men.”


Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
en.wikipedia.org/Ada_Lovelace 7
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/ada-lovelace-the-first-tech-visionary
https://www.biography.com/scholar/ada-lovelace
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ada-Lovelace
https://inews.co.uk/news/science/ada-lovelace-day-2018-facts-female-scientists-506562
https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/blog/computers-around-century-ago/
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-ada-lovelaces-notes-on-the-analytical-engine-created-the-first-computer-program/
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/a/analyten.htm
https://www.cnn.com/ampstories/tech/meet-ada-lovelace-the-first-computer-programmer
https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/
https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Babbage
http://mentalfloss.com/article/53131/ada-lovelace-first-computer-programmer
https://inews.co.uk/news/science/ada-lovelace-day-2018-facts-female-scientists-506562
https://www.1843magazine.com/intelligence/cracking-coder
https://www.uvu.edu/wsc/blog/blog_posts/whywomenshistorymatters.html

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    Author R. Ann Siracusa

    Novelist, retired architect and urban planner, world traveler, quilter, owl collector, devoted wife-mother-grandmother, great-grandmother, and, according to some, wild-assed liberal.

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