Uncertainty can make anyone fear the unknown. However, scientists learn to work with this looming obstacle, for they frequently encounter uncertainty. In the passage, The Great Influenza, author John M. Barry depicts his idea of scientific research and how constant uncertainty impacts it. His purpose is to give characteristics to scientific research thus enabling his audience to view methodical scientific research in a new light. Barry’s inventive use of antithesis, metaphor, and rhetorical questions, establishes the important characteristics of scientific research, especially the ability to embrace uncertainty.
Barry begins his account with contrasting the strength of certainty and the weakness of uncertainty to better define the term uncertainty. This sophisticated antithesis initiates a contrast between the
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He demonstrates examples of scientists approaching uncertainty while conducting their research like “scientists exist of the frontier”(Line 23). Barry also discusses that the best of the scientists “move deep into a wilderness region..,” in which they know nothing and have scavenge for information to then create tools that did not exist beforehand. He describes that as “grunt work, tedious work…,”(Line 37). The purpose of the figurative language demonstrates examples of how scientific research is given characteristics. Furthermore, Barry includes a sequence of rhetorical questions as another example of scientists and conducting their research, such as “Would a pick be best..,” along with “...would dynamite be too indiscriminately destructive?”(Line 40, 42). Barry adopts the rock scenario in order to to demonstrate for the audience how a scientist starting out would bounce from idea to idea quickly. This example of how scientists encounter uncertainty prompts the audience, and leaves the audience to consider how these rhetorical strategies strengthen Barry’s
In The Great Influenza, John M. Barry educates citizens of the everyday challenges that scientists face through utilizing rhetorical questions, cause and effect, and contrast. Barry’s uses of the rhetorical strategies highlights the beauty of uncertainty because of failure, scientists can make new discoveries everyday. In relation
“I made money rapidly,” Charles Sligh explained, “The demands for flowers frequently were so great that all the florists in this community exhausted their supply daily, and the prices of everything were very high then.”1 Along with florists, funeral directors, and orderlies were also making a killing during World War One. “The undertaker which was half a block away from me had pine boxes on the sidewalk, pilled high. Me and two of my friends would go down there and play on those boxes; it was like playing on the pyramids.”2 Although business was booming for these professions, it was not because of the war. It was the result of an unexpected killer that swept across the world claiming victims at an unprecedented rate.
The epidemic began at around the end of the first World War and was the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. Some symptoms of the influenza included muscle pains, sore throat, headache, fever, glandular disturbances, eye aberrations, heart action slowing, and depression of all bodily functions and reactions. The flu is highly contagious and spreads around easily whenever an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks. This global disaster was nicknamed the “Spanish Flu,” or “La Grippe.” The nickname of the Spanish Flu came from one of the earliest countries to be hit hard by influenza; eight million people in Spain were killed in the May of 1918. There were also other nicknames for the epidemic. The French called it “purulent bronchitis,” the Italians named it “sandfly fever,” and the Germans labeled it “Blitz Katarrh.” The Influenza Epidemic of 1918, a virus that spread throughout the globe, affected the world in many ways and had many devastating after effects.
The influenza pandemic of 1918 had not only altered the lives of thousands, but the habitual lives of family and work as well. The Spanish Influenza collected more lives than all of the casualties of war in the twentieth century combined. After the disease had swept through the nation, towns that once began their days in lazy, comfortable manners had begun to struggle to get through a single day. What started as a mild neglect of a typical fever or case of chills had escalated and grown at an alarmingly rapid rate to be fearsome and tragic.
...orm that is anticipated and never amounts to anything, snowflakes that are each very different but experience the same thing, were also given examples human health and how doctors often don’t know what has gone wrong, and trivial things like bouncing a ping pong and not be able to determine where it will go. It goes on to say that science is often failing the test of stability. Many ecologists were realized that nature was more complex than they realized and that it would be nearly impossible to determine every aspect of the environment, and science.
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 occurred during the midst of World War I, and it would claim more lives than the war itself. The disease erupted suddenly without a forewarning and spread rapidly across the globe. It seemed as though all of humanity had fallen under the mercy of this deadly illness. Influenza had very clear symptoms as described by William Collier in his letter to The Lancet. After a patient seizes their temperature can run up to 105° or more while their pulse averages at about 90 beats per minute. The high temperature and low pulse are frequently combined with epistaxis (nosebleed) and cyanosis (blueness of the skin). The epistaxis is caused by the high temperature and the cyanosis is caused by a lack of oxygen due to the decreased pulse (Kent 34). The author of Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919, Susan Kinglsey Kent, provides a brief history of the pandemic and documents from the time period. Many of the included documents show how unprepared and unorganized governments attempted to contain and control a disease they had never experienced, and how the expectations of the governments changed as a result of their successes and failures.
One of the most effective methods Barry uses throughout the aforementioned passage, is his comparison of scientists to explorers. The first lines of paragraph four set up the comparison, “All real scientists exist on the frontier,” this furthers the point Barry makes that scientific research is about uncertainty and embracing it, only then will the research that is done yield any answers. Barry furthers the point of uncertainty is the very nature of science with this quote, “There they probe in a
Influenza or flu is caused by RNA viruses of the family orthomyxoviridae, that affects the nose, throat, and lungs- the respiratory system. The common symptoms are: fever and respiratory problems, such as cough, sore throat,stuffy nose, as well as headaches and muscle aches. Influenza viruses are spread mainly by droplets made from people coughing, sneezing or talking while having the flu. These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people or can inhaled into the lungs. It is least common for the virus to spread by touching an infected surface then their mouth or nose. Flu viruses are divided into 3 categories, A, B, C. A and B are responsible for problems in the respiratory system that typically occurs during the winter. Influenza types C is quite different from A and B. Type C only cause mild respiratory symptom or none at all.
The Response to the Influenza of 1918 At the time, the Influenza of 1918 was called the Spanish Flu. Spain was not involved in the expanding great war (i.e., World War I) and therefore was not censoring it's press. However, Germany, Britain, and America were censoring their newspapers for anything that would lower morale. Therefore, Spain was the first country to publish accounts of the pandemic (Barry 171 and Furman 326), even though the pandemic most likely started in either France or the United States. It was also unique in it's deadliness; it “killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century”
In the summer of 1995, the periodical Wilson Quarterly published "Enemies of Promise," an essay by J. Michael Bishop, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of microbiology from the University of California, San Francisco. The essay addressed the renewed criticism the scientific community has received in recent years by an ignorant and unduly critical public. The overall effect this single work has had on the world may be nominal, but the points Professor Bishop raises are significant, and provide ammunition against the ignorants who maintain this "intellectual war," centuries after it was sparked.
The swine influenza or swine flu is a respiratory disease in pigs that is caused by the type A influenza viruses. These viruses are referred to as swine flu viruses but scientifically the main virus is called the swine triple reassortant (tr) H1N1 influenza virus. When the viruses infect humans they are called variant viruses. This infection has been caused in humans mainly by the H1N1v virus in the United States. The H1N1 virus originates in animals due to improper conditions and the food they ingest. The virus stays in latency form, thus harmless to the respective animal. The longer the animals survive the more likely the virus is to develop and strengthen making it immune to vaccines. The virus reproduced through the lytic cycle. The virus injects its own nucleic acids into a host cell and then they form a circle in the center of the cell. Rather than copying its own nucleic acids, the cell will copy the viral acids. The copies of viral acids then organize themselves as viruses inside of the cell. The membrane will eventually split leaving the viruses free to infect other cells.
The Fear of Science To live in the today's world is to be surrounded by the products of science. For it is science that gave our society color television, the bottle of aspirin, and the polyester shirt. Thus, science has greatly enhanced our society; yet, our society is still afraid of the effects of science. This fear of science can be traced back to the nineteenth century, where scientists had to be secretive in experimenting with science. Although science did wonders in the nineteenth century, many people feared science and its effects because of the uncertainty of the results of science.
At this level it's not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science, as of what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification.
Before a resolution or explanation of a concrete problem, a research problem has to be established. Certainly, unraveling and explaining the problem of the research does not necessarily resolve or answer the problem. A research problem does not necessarily change something in the real world once the problem is solved; instead, resolving the research problem permits the researcher to discover more ab...
Our basic objective is to examine the scientific developments through history and how they affect human life and society. To meet that objective we will first develop tools to analyze the relationship between science and the increasingly complex decisions we have to make regarding the way we apply science for human welfare.