(6494)  Mon 7 Aug 95 17:01
By: Blanche Nonken
To: All
Re: Quit badmouthing science
St:
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My mom sent me this clipping at my request, but she left out the date it was
printed.

JONAS SALK STANDS TALL AMONG ERSATZ HEROES
Barbara Yost, writer for Phoenix Gazette.  Orange County Register, date
unknown.


  When I was a little girl in the early 1950's, my brother and I were forbidden
to run through the garden hose to cool off in the hot Midwestern summers.  A
bogeyman lurked in the water, my mother feared.  Its name was polio.
  Polio was a dreadful thing then, crumpling the bodies of children like wads
of paper.  It put tiny bodies into big machines that forced tiny lungs to work.
 Which of our schoolmates would be struck next?  Or would it be us?
  Next thing I remember, we were getting shots that were supposed to make the
bogeyman go away.  Then we were sucking on pink sugar that would make sure it
never came back.

  It never did.

  Jonas Salk, the bogeyman-buster, died last month.  He was 80 and working on a
vaccine for AIDS.  AIDS would prove to be a tougher diseas to conquer than
polio.  A world accustomed to magic bullets and the wonders of science has
found no miracles in the fight against a monster that won't be chased away by a
shot or a sugar cube.
  But until the end, when he died of heart failure, Dr. Salk's world was his
laboratory where he worked diligently on the eradication of evil.  If you
called him a hero, no one would argue.

  Other heroes have also been in the news.  Boxing hero Mike Tyson was welcomed
back to New York after serving 3 years in prison for raping a teenage beauty
pageant contestant.  Baseball hero Mickey Mantle left the hospital after
recieving a new liver, transplanted after he nearly drank himself to death.
  Former New York Mets hero Darryl Strawberry entered the Yankee fold after
once again cleaning up from drug addiction.  Movie hero Hugh Grant tarnished
his on-screen image as a boyish charmer by getting caught with a prostitute.

  New York City threw a mini-rally for Tyson, dampened only by a protest from
women who thought it unseemly to cheer a convicted and unrepentant rapist as if
he were king of the Mardi Gras.
  Some people thought Mickey Mantle didn't deserve a new liver because he took
such poor care of his old one.  Grant is struggling to explain his actions to
his girlfriend.

  It all kind of makes the word "hero" smell like week-old fish.

  But save the word for Salk's legacy.  He's the man who made fear go away 40
years ago.  He was trying to do it again when he died at the end of a life
without parades or promises of riches.  He died clean, died too soon, even at
age 80.

  Tyson will fight again, and he will be paid millions.  Millions of dollars
could work wonders on diseases that make life short or miserable for many
children - muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, sickle cell anemia.
  There are still bogeymen out there, lurking where children live.  The
diseases we have left are the tough ones.  They're not easily understood,cured,
or prevented.  Cures talke people like Salk to unravel medical mysteries.  And
money helps.  All the money wasted during last year's silly and egotistical
baseball strike could have funded a lot of research.

  We do like to honor our hearoes, but we're a little ambiguous about whether
people with fuzzy hair, thick glasses, and white lab coats qualify.  They're
not on the cover of "People".  They don't show up on late night talk shows,and
Diane Sawyer doesn't spotlight their love lives to boost her ratings. There are
no Jonas Salk action figures or Happy Meal toys.
  Scientists are rarely considered "hunks."

  At best, they're contestants on "Jeopardy."  And when they slink back into
their workshops to coax secrets out of microbes, we forget about them until
they make another miracle or vanquish another disease.

  Science needs a good marketing campaign.  A media blitz.  A poster boy. Find
a biologist who looks like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt  with the magnetic
personality of a Michael Jordon.  Book him on talk shows.  Reveal the secrets
of his sex life.

Isn't it true, Mr. Frankenheimer, that the e. coli bacteria is an aphrodisiac?
What's really growing in that petri dish?

  Quiet, diligent technicians make poor heroes, it seems.  But when Mickey
Mantle's career was just getting started, Dr. Salk was saving children's lives
so they could go to baseball games and make themselves sick on peanuts and
Cracker Jack without worrying about the bogeyman.

  Jonas Salk was a hunk.

 *Tagline 1.4c*
 ** Three classes of people: The Haves, The Have-Nots, and the Charge-Its.

--- Maximus 2.01wb
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