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HISTORY

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The Discovery of Insulin: A Story of Monstrous Egos and Toxic Rivalries Meet the feuding scientists who battled for credit over the discovery of insulin.

By on July 20th, 2023

ttps://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-discovery-of-insulin-a-story-of-monstrous-egos-and-toxic-rivalries?utm_source=pocket-newtab

When Frederick Banting’s phone rang one morning in October 1923, it was the call that every scientist must dream of receiving. On the other end of the line, an excited friend asked Banting if he had seen the morning newspapers. When Banting said no, his friend broke the news himself. Banting had just been awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery of insulin.

 Frederick Banting on the cover of TIME magazine on August 27, 1923. Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo 

Banting told his friend to “go to hell” and slammed the receiver down. Then he went out and bought the morning paper. Sure enough, there in the headlines he saw in black and white that his worst fears had come true: he had indeed been awarded the Nobel – but so too had his boss, John Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto.

This is a tale of monstrous egos, toxic career rivalries and injustices. But of course, there is another character in this drama: diabetes itself.

According to a 2021 World Health Organization report, about 9 million people with type 1 diabetes are alive today thanks to insulin. I’m one of them, and it was my own shock diagnosis with this condition, just over ten years ago, that first led me to investigate the discovery of insulin – the drug that I would be injecting several times a day for the rest of my life.

‘The Pissing Evil’

Diabetes derives its name from the ancient Greek word for “to flow” – a reference to one of its most common symptoms and for which the 17th-century English doctor Thomas Willis (1625-75) gave it the far more memorable name of “the pissing evil”. But frequent trips to the toilet were the least of a patient’s worries.

Before the discovery of insulin, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes meant certain death. Unable to metabolise sugar from carbohydrates in their diet, patients became weak and emaciated until, due to the production of toxic compounds known as ketones, they slipped into a coma and died. Even at the start of the 20th century, there was little that could be done for patients with this condition, other than to put them on a starvation diet that might at best delay the inevitable.

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How Jews Fared in 19th Century ‘Palestine’ Before Zionism and Balfour. July 14, 2023 by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-jews-fared-in-19th-century-palestine/

In recent years, Palestinian and other Arab propagandists have claimed that before the Zionists appeared, supposedly intent on taking over by force land “belonging to the Arabs,” the local Arabs in “Palestine” (a toponym not used by the Arabs until the late 20th century, for until 1948 they thought of the area as part of “southern Syria”) had gotten along quite well with the Jews who had been living in the area long before the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers from Europe.

In this version of history, it was only when Jews, having become Zionists, suddenly became land-grabbers, “stealing Arab land,” that the Arabs, quite justifiably, turned on them in self-defense.

This claim is as false as the one that so many peoples in the West accept about Islamic Spain being a splendid example of interfaith tolerance and cultural syncretism. Elder of Ziyon several months ago compiled news reports from the period before the Balfour Declaration, even before the first stirrings of Zionism, to show what had been the real relations of Muslims to Jews in “Palestine.” More on the evidence showing the treatment that Jews had to endure at the hands of Muslims in “Palestine” in the period “before Balfour and before Herzl” can be found here: “A short catalogue of Arab intolerance of Jews in Palestine before both Zionism and the Balfour Declaration,” Elder of Ziyon, April 10, 2023:

There is no doubt that there were some friendships between some Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem and throughout the Arab world, but to use them as evidence of widespread acceptance of Jews as equals or near-equals is not only flawed reasoning but utterly false.

The evidence that Jews were treated horribly is irrefutable.

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America’s Strength for Freedom by Lawrence Kadish

By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19801/america-strength-for-freedom

Earlier this month, a Gatestone Institute reader, Goh Heung Yong, submitted a comment in which he noted:

“No one should forget that it was America’s strength for freedom, that freed just about all of Asia from Japanese occupation. Her power for peace liberated half of Europe and kept Stalin’s predatory advance at bay. America still is that shining beacon for freedom and civilized existence.”

His astute observation reveals a number of important insights regarding the historic role of the United States during World War II. While much of our attention is often drawn to the European theater of operations, America fought a two-front war. The Pacific theater was a literal fight-to-the-finish as our Marines, Army, Navy and Army Air Corps created a ring of steel around the Japanese Empire intent on fighting for every square inch of land. America won in the Pacific at enormous cost, and only the use of two atomic weapons finally brought the conflict to an end.

What few Americans appreciate was the path of destruction and litany of war crimes committed by the Japanese Empire throughout their zone of occupation, which included huge swaths of China.

Historians have documented their crimes; these included repeated massacres of civilians and prisoners of war, sexual slavery, human experimentation, forced labor and starvation. While those crimes occurred wherever the Emperor’s soldiers occupied Asia, China bore the brunt of Japan’s assault on humanity. Historians estimate that from 1937 to 1945, nearly 4 million Chinese, mostly civilians, were killed as a direct result of Japanese violence.

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HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stranger in Moscow On this date in 1988, Ronald Reagan told Soviet college students about freedom – and the future. by Bruce Bawer

By on May 31st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/__trashed-19/

Thirty-five years ago today, on May 31, 1988, Ronald Reagan, who was in the last year of his presidency and was in Moscow for the last of his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, delivered a landmark speech to an audience of students at Moscow State University, a hub of scientific and technical research. The occasion was unprecedented, and the speech itself a masterstroke: with palpable enthusiasm, Reagan talked up the ongoing technological revolution that heralded a new information age, and urged the young Soviets to embrace freedom and peace so that they could be part of it:

Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now, quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict. Its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives. It’s easy to underestimate because it’s not accompanied by banners or fanfare. It’s been called the technological or information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the tiny silicon chip, no bigger than a fingerprint.

Reagan outlined some of the many ways in which our lives were being – or were about to be – transformed, from weather forecasting to instant computer translations to the mapping of the human genome. All of these developments, he underscored, were products not of government planning but of independent experimentation by individuals, some of them very young people – the near-contemporaries of those Moscow students – tinkering in their own garages. And their achievements, he pointed out, would have been impossible without the gift of freedom – a subject on which he proceeded to expound to that audience of Communist vassals with his customary eloquence:

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream – to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters. Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer….

Cognizant that those students had learned the importance, in scientific and technological development, of ingenuity, innovation, and experiment, Reagan cannily played on this learning in his attempt to hook them on the idea of freedom. But he also mentioned other fruits of Western liberty that he knew would appeal to them: for example, he enticed them with the then unimaginable notion that someday, like their counterparts in the West, they might actually be able to spend a summer backpacking around Europe. “Is this just a dream?” he asked. “Perhaps, but it is a dream that is our responsibility to have come true.” In fact, it would come true in three years. Similarly, he floated the idea of sharing U.S. magazines and TV shows with the USSR by satellite. Of course, the Internet would soon make those items, and a great deal more, available to Russians.

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Things Worth Remembering: The Extraordinary Courage of Tatiana Gnedich Condemned to ten years in the gulag, the scholar sat in her cell and translated an epic poem—all 16,000 lines—from memory. Douglas Murray

By on May 29th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-tatiana-gnedich?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Here I am going to break one of my own rules, and dedicate a column to a translator of a poet, rather than an actual poet. I cannot stop myself from doing so. For it is necessary to pause and to say the name of Tatiana Gnedich.

I started this series talking about the significance of one act of memory—that of Boris Pasternak and the thousands of Russian writers in 1937 who knew Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare by heart. Pasternak was then, as now, a famous writer. His own act of translation and memory cannot be diminished. But if it could ever have been superseded, then it is by a woman who almost nobody in the English-speaking world has heard of.

One of Gnedich’s ancestors had translated The Iliad into Russian, and in the 1930s she looked set to follow in his footsteps. She was studying seventeenth-century English literature at Leningrad State University when the purges began, and the universities were among the institutions trying to oust all enemies of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism for crimes that shifted by the day.

At a meeting at the university (which she was not at), Gnedich was denounced for having noble ancestry and, what is more, of hiding it. She was indignant at the claim—indignant that she should be shamed into hiding ancestors of whom she was proud. 

So she was thrown out of the university for “boasting about her noble ancestry.” The madness of those days was such that even someone who simply wanted to study the Elizabethan poets could not avoid politics.

At some point, Gnedich was allowed back into the university. With her mother, she moved into a small wooden house in Leningrad. During the siege of the city, from late 1941 to early 1944, her mother died and their house burned down. 

In December 1944, she got it in her head that even entertaining a desire to go to Britain was an act of sedition. She confessed to this, was duly put on trial, and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag.

While in jail awaiting transfer to a faraway Gulag camp, an interrogator asked her why she didn’t use any of the books that she was entitled to in the holding cell. She replied: “I’m busy. I don’t have the time.” 

Busy with what, the interrogator asked. 

“I’m translating Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ ” she told him. 

The interrogator realized that she was doing it from memory. 

“But how do you remember your final version?” he asked her. 

Gnedich agreed that this was the hardest part, “especially now that I’m approaching the end. My head is too full to remember anything new.” 

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The FBI Was Created by Napoleon’s Grandnephew History takes some odd twists and turns. by Daniel Greenfield

By on May 9th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-fbi-was-created-by-napoleons-grandnephew/

History takes some odd twists and turns.

This particular odd twist began when Napoleon tried to build a dynasty out of less-than-ideal stock. His brother Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte lacked his talent for winning battles, running a country or doing much of anything. After disgracing himself during a naval command, he fled to America and married an heiress.

Jerome had a son, but remained a spineless weasel. After trying and failing to talk Napoleon into accepting his wife, he agreed to divorce her and marry royalty. Jerome failed miserably as a prince, wasted money, lost battles and was a disaster. Meanwhile, his son, also Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, grew up in America. Jerome had two sons, Jerome II and Charles ‘Charlie’ Joseph Bonaparte. Both men made a better show of the family name than their absent deadbeat prince of a dad had. Jerome II became a successful fighting man while Charlie wound up in Teddy Roosevelt’s cabinet as Attorney General Charlie Bonaparte or Charle the Crook Chaser.

Charlie Bonaparte created the Bureau of Investigation which would later become the FBI.

Napoleon’s grandnephew created the FBI originally to fight leftist anarchist terrorists. As organized crime took off, the FBI’s mission shifted more to what we know it as today, combating interstate crime.

And for those who accuse the Bureau of overreach, it was created by a Bonaparte.

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THE GREAT LIBERATION OF THE LAND OF ISRAEL : VICTOR SHARPE

By on May 8th, 2023

I was re-reading an early article from May 26, 2003, titled “The Divine Zionist Roadmap” written by Rabbi Eliezer Waldman. It dealt with the liberation of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, in that miraculous Israeli victory of June 1967 over Arab genocidal aggression.

It also dealt with the liberation of the ancient sites of the Jewish towns and villages that had for too long been occupied by the Jordanian Arab regime.

The Jordanian Arab Legion, officered by British mercenaries, had illegally annexed the biblical heartland of Israel known as Judea and Samaria in 1948 and had renamed it the West Bank; a name the world since then has gleefully and shamefully embraced. Incidentally, only Britain and Pakistan ever recognized that Arab land grab.

Rabbi Waldman, in writing of the Israeli victory over the Arabs, stated, “…We were then blessed by divine miracles that not only helped us overcome our enemies but united us again with the heartland of Israel. Thousands of people filled with the enthusiasm of Jewish faith, returned to our liberated towns in the hills of Judea and Samaria, so that the song of redemption could be heard again in these hills after 2,000 years of desolation.

“Thus, we established the significant reality of 250,000 Jews living a normal Jewish life of faith and joy in Yesha today. More than all the distorted plans and roadmaps drawn up by foreigners, we are sure that this reality will determine the future life of Israel and its redemption process.”

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ELECTIONS, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Trump 2024 Dilemma: What Would Ben-Gurion Do? He saw the need to help the British fight the Nazis while opposing the British occupation of Palestine.By Ruth R. Wisse

By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-dilemma-what-would-ben-gurion-do-israel-british-white-paper-re-election-52ed5dcc?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him re-election while defeating those who did not allow him to govern.”

“We can’t win with Trump and we can’t win without him,” a friend said, echoing many other sober Americans. But I suggested that recent Jewish history shows a way out of the bind Republicans face in regaining the White House without its former incumbent.

In 1939, as World War II began, the Jewish community of Palestine faced simultaneous and competing challenges from Europe and at home.

Adolf Hitler intended to wipe out the Jews of Europe. Jews in the Land of Israel urgently needed to provide refuge for the millions being refused entry everywhere else. They faced resistance in Palestine, where the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was determined to prevent the fleeing Jews from entering their homeland. He incited the local Arab population to violence, warning the British overseers of potential pan-Arab resistance against the British throughout the Middle East.

Britain had been entrusted with the mandate for Palestine after defeating the Ottomans in World War I. Though the mandate was intended to include the establishment of a Jewish national home, three-fourths of the territory was given to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and British authorities undertook neutral supervision over the rest. The more the Arabs rioted in the 1920s and ’30s, the more the British gave way to their demands and prevented Jews from arming in self-defense. This culminated in the British White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and prevented Jews’ rescue from certain death.

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Our Singular Century How to connect the dots when they’re spinning out of control by Walter Russell Mead

By on April 28th, 2023

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/our-singular-century-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia

The American historian Henry Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain during the Civil War who was charged with keeping Britain from intervening on the side of the South. Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of President John Adams. Born in 1838 when the railroad was still a novelty, he died in 1918. His histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations are still read with respect.

It was the acceleration of historical change more than the fact of it that increasingly fascinated Adams as he watched the Industrial Revolution and its associated dislocations unfold around him. Late in his life he set himself the task of quantifying, so far as this was possible, the rate of change as measured by the total amount of physical force that human beings could control. His results have fascinated me for years.

What he found is what we can call the Adams curve. Wind power and human and animal muscle power were the resources at humanity’s disposal for much of our history, and the amount of force humanity could generate grew slowly with population and a slow increase in the mastery of natural forces.

After 1600 his estimates showed the beginning of a faster increase in humanity’s power. The increase visibly accelerates between 1700 and 1800, and between 1800 and 1900 the flat line of earlier centuries takes the shape of a hyperbola as the rate of increase in human power reached for the sky. As Adams put it, “The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900, but, measured by any standard known to science—by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape—the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800.”

Looking ahead, Adams saw only more of the same, with the curve of human progress becoming more hyperbolic as it became more nearly a vertical line moving straight up the graph. The historian, whose early recollections included walking hand in hand with his grandfather John Quincy Adams to the town school, looked forward to an unrecognizable future in which the gap between pure thought and the material world would close sometime around 2025.

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Five Facts for its 80th anniversary By Moshe Phillips

By on April 6th, 2023

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/warsaw-ghetto-uprising-five-facts-for-its-80th-anniversary/2023/04/03/

April 19 is the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Here are five stunning facts about the revolt that most histories of the Holocaust hardly ever include.

Mordechai Anielewicz was not the sole leader of the ghetto fighters.

After the naming of the Yad Mordechai kibbutz, with its physically stunning Memorial to Mordechai Anielewicz, and the heroic story of its defenders in the 1948 War of Independence battle fought there, the name Anielewicz became forever cemented in the public’s mind as the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. However, Anielewicz led only one of the two main armed resistance organizations in the ghetto. Anielewicz led the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization). The other organization was the ZZW (Jewish Military Union), and its frontline commander was Paweł Frenkel (also spelled Frenkiel). The ZZW’s chairman was psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. David Wdowinski, who survived the war and testified against Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Two years later, he published a short, personal account about the uprising called And We Are Not Saved (1963). Both the ZOB and ZZW are best described as Zionist organizations, and the majority of their leaderships and fighters came from Zionist youth movements.

The fighters only had bricks, Molotov cocktails and a few pistols with which to launch their revolt.

On Jan. 18, 1943, the first armed Jewish resistance action in the ghetto by an organized force occurred. It is believed that this first round of fighting was conducted by the young Zionists with pistols and improvised explosive devices such as homemade grenades. Many reports claim that for the first-time resistance fighters were able to take rifles from the Nazis they killed. Whether or not that is true, what is known is that the ZZW was able to obtain machine guns and other rifles from both criminal sources and from contacts in the Polish resistance Home Army (the AK).

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