It is true that sometimes we don’t appreciate the things we have. Certainly, every time you fill a glass of water you are not concerned about catching a disease (unless you live in Flint, Michigan), or every time you open your freezer you are not amazed by the convenience of being able to store food for months without fear of decomposing it.
The quality of our life improved so much over the centuries due to the scientific discoveries that lead to technological advances. A proxy of this increase in well-being can be observed by looking at the world population that increased exponentially in the last century.
Yet, things were not always like this. There was a time when death was lurking around the corner, with infectious diseases as one of the main causes. To get an idea about how life was in a period we must just look at the art that was produced.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his “The Triumph of Death” painting, depicted a vivid representation of what life was like in the year 1562. In his painting you can see a desolate landscape, decorated with leafless trees and littered with corpses, with an army of skeletons advancing to bring death to peasants and nobles alike, without making distinctions of wealth. Was he being a bit macabre? Probably. But we also need to understand that he was describing tragical times. In fact, in 1347 the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, invaded Europe. We don’t have exact numbers and we can only estimate, but the plague wreaked havoc for about 300 years, claiming about 25 million lives, about one fourth of the population in Europe at the time (Ref Book 1).
Clearly not as many people would have died if we knew about the existence of microbes and if the concepts of sanitation were not so rudimentary. However, it would be unfair to think about our ancestors as naïve.
Excluding religious considerations, there are some useful information that can be found in the Bible, especially about some ancient customs. For example, the Bible talks a lot about leprosy and it refers to the isolation of lepers. Even if in the term lepers they also included people without infectious disease, we know that even back in the days, they knew that by isolating sick people they could limit the spreading of disease.
Obviously, the ancient Greeks knew something about it too (I’m amazed by how many things they knew). For example, around the 400 a.c. Hippocrates was the first to realize that illness could be transmitted between individuals by exchanging clothes or objects. He set forth ethical standards that are in use even today in the practice of medicine. Thucydides, another Greek that lived in the same period, realized that people that survived a plague could be exposed to infected people without the risk of getting the disease again.
Nonetheless, they did not have a crystal ball, or even better a microscope, to know that microbes were responsible for most disease. We had to wait until the year 1665 for Robert Hooke to make the first microscope. However, he did not think about observing microorganisms, he was just looking at thin slices of corks, and he observed that they had an interesting structure, full of confined spaces that were reminiscent of the small, bare rooms of monks, so he decided to call those, cells.
The first guy to really figure out that microscopes could be used to look at microbes was a dutch merchant called Anton van Leeuwenhoek (I’ll just call him “the Dutch” otherwise I will butcher his name). The Dutch had a passion for crafting lenses, and the ones he was making were extraordinary, some could even magnify as much as 300X! (Take that Leica or Nikon!). This was basically his hobby, and he learned that these microbes were actually everywhere, he was calling them “animalcules”. He started by looking at stagnant water, then started bugging sick people and he even studied his own mouth. He was so passionate about it that he continued his studies until his death at the age of 91. Unfortunately, he always refused to sell his special lenses to anyone, thus delaying the widespread application of microscopes to study microbiology, for that to happen we had to wait another century!
This story highlights the importance of making science available to anyone, probably the reason why science is progressing very fast nowadays is that we have faster and easier ways to share results, discuss ideas and most importantly, learn what other people are doing in science.
A remarkable example of how science improved the quality of our lives can be found also in our drinking water. Centuries ago, drinking water was quite dangerous, to avoid catching a disease people had to boil the water first or be very careful about the source of water, back in the days getting sick was lethal.
However, the introduction of health departments and the addition of chlorine in water decreased dramatically the rates of infectious diseases. And with fewer people getting sick there was also less contagion, the graph below explains it better than words:
Image adapted from the cdc morbidity and mortality report
To look at the numbers, in 1900 about 30.4% of all deaths claimed the lives of children younger than 5 years old, in 1997 this percentage decreased to 1.4% (cdc morbidity and mortality report). Better healthcare, a more sophisticated sanitation, the discovery of antibiotics and a deeper knowledge of microbiology played a huge role in this. We also learned that prevention would save more lives than waiting to get sick and looking for a cure. We launched several vaccination campaigns that eradicated several diseases that were plaguing the lives of average people, for example diphtheria, tetanus, poliomyelitis, measles, small-pox, rubella, mumps and Haemophilus influenzae (cdc morbidity and mortality report). As a result, fewer people died of infectious disease and we live longer than ever, pushing our biological limits.
Image adapted from the cdc morbidity and mortality report
Evolution grants some biological advantages to different species, allowing them to thrive where other organisms struggle. Some species in the animal kingdom evolved superior and almost unbeatable immune system, for example, even the immune system of an alligator is ferocious against his enemies (Merchant, Roche, Elsey, & Prudhomme, 2003).
However, we received a different gift, something extraordinary that enables us to constantly challenge our biology and create our own advantages, I am talking about intelligence. We created books (and now steemit posts) as a physical expansion of our memory, computers to expand our ability to process information, antibiotics to fight microorganisms and vaccines to prevent contracting disease. Science is a valuable tool in our evolutionary arsenal that originated from this amazing gift we received from nature. It would be silly not to recognize its importance and, as a consequence, to resist the temptations to use it more and more.
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