The Cost of Not Doing Health Research

It is a pleasure to note the ties of the International Association for Humanitarian Medicine with Italy, the land of Galileo, Leonardo, Spallanzani, Fallopio, Aselli, Galvani and his wife, Malpighi, Bellini, Fabricius of Acquapendente (the teacher of William Harvey), Realdo Colombo, Domenico Cotugno, Golgi, Cerletti and Bignami and many more, never forgetting the two Nightingale sisters: Parthenope, born in Naples, and Florence, born in Florence. Their beautiful garden still flourishes there, looking out over the Duomo. And in Palermo, there was Professor Leonardo Bianchi, who contributed so much to brain research. When we speak of research, what do we mean? When President Roosevelt put that Socratic question to his ever-present advisor, Harry Hopkins, more than a halfcentury ago, Hopkins replied in his condensed and forceful way: “Research is spending to save.” This definition, it seems to me, speaks volumes. Historically, the cost of the research was negligible in some amazing investigations. For instance, in 1540, a medical student, Valerius Cordus, first synthesized ether by pouring inexpensive sulphuric acid over his family’s Christmas wine. Besides adding to the festive cheer, he showed ether’s anaesthetic effect on chickens, which went on a “binge” by eating grain moistened with the new liquid which he named oleum dulci vitrioli. They fell senseless to the ground but soon recovered and consumed even more of this new general anaesthetic. Four years later, alas, Cordus died in the malarial marshes of Italy’s south coast where he was busy collecting 500 botanical species for study, and his pivotal experiments were forgotten. Much later, 300 years later, the first major use of ether anaesthesia was demonstrated in Boston by a medical student, William Morton, on a surgical patient of the 68-year-old professor of surgery at Harvard University, John Collins Warren. Where had this 300-year-old discovery been hiding, and why? The results of research in the medical sciences are sometimes lost to mankind for such lack of communication. In 1897, a medical student, Ernest Duchesne, at the University of Lyons where he was subsidized by the Army, carried out the experiment for which Florey and Chain received the Nobel Prize 45 years later. In his graduation thesis of 54 pages, Duchesne described the protection against Bacillus typhosus, which the mould Penicillium glaucum conferred on his test animals. His controls, without the protection of this mould, all died.