(Paul has five siblings: Lisa Osteen, Tamara Osteen, Joel Osteen, April Osteen, and half-brother Justin Osteen. Justin is born of Pastor John’s first marriage to Emma Jean Shaffer.)
Rather than following in his father’s footsteps as a pastor, Paul Osteen set his heart on the practice of medicine.
He attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma and received his M.D. along with others in the first Oral Roberts medical school graduating class.
Oral Roberts University is, of course, the school evangelist Oral Roberts brought to the world. Prayer is an integral part of the university’s mission.
Dr. Paul Osteen (’78, ’82 M.D.) was on ORU’s first missions team. He spent 17 years as a surgeon before joining the pastoral team at Lakewood Church in Texas. Paul Osteen is the older brother of Joel Osteen, lead pastor of Lakewood. Paul serves at the church, providing insight to the pastoral team. He has been pivotal to the growth of Lakewood and is a constant support for his brother Joel. Osteen and his family have been called to serve around the world at mission hospitals, schools and orphanages. Each year, he spends months in Africa, caring for patients, performing surgeries and visiting orphanages with his wife Jennifer and their children.
Following graduation from Oral Roberts, the new-Dr. Paul Osteen completed his residency in General Surgery at the University of Arkansas Medical Science Campus in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He was the Robert M. Bransford, M.D. Outstanding Chief Resident in Surgery (1987). He was in private practice of general and vascular surgery in Little Rock for many years.
He married a nurse, Jennifer Osteen.
Jennifer Osteen, Wife Of Paul Osteen
He and Jennifer have four children.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Paul trained and practiced as a general and vascular surgeon for over seventeen years
After Paul’s dad, Pastor John Osteen, passed away from a heart attack in 1999, Paul felt a calling to work in the ministry. He moved with his family to Houston, Texas, and started helping at Lakewood Church, founded by his father and led by his brother Joel Osteen, as an associate pastor.
Lakewood Church grew remarkably under the next generation’s guidance, and moved into a huge new church building.
Lakewood Church As Seen At Night
Interested in learning more about the dynamic growth and blessed history of Lakewood Church?
Dr Paul Osteen, in addition to pastoring duties at Lakewood Church, also felt called upon to go on medical missions to provide medical care for underserved populations, especially in Sub Saharan Africa.
Sub Saharan Africa Depicted In Green
Dr. Paul Osteen With One Of Many Patients In Africa
Paul also hosts the annual global medical missions conference, which gathers medical professionals who have a vested interest in going on missions and providing support and resources in impoverished areas.
He saw the need for such a conference when he spent time in Zambia, and was informed that he was the only surgeon in an area as big as the state of Louisiana in the United States.
Since then, Paul has been on missions all over the world, from Cameroon to Iraq to Kenya.
In 2015, he founded Mobilizing Medical Missions along with Jennifer Osteen, his wife, which organizes the M3 annual conference.
Paul is the voice of the audiobook version of his late father’s book, Your Words Hold a Miracle.
His mother, Dodie Osteen, is a liver cancer survivor.
Paul was inspired by his mother’s former career as a nurse to go into the medical field, and now combines the passion of his mother and his father in his mission work.
He spent a decade outside the operating room fully dedicating himself to Lakewood Church, and then returned to surgery on his first mission trip. After that first trip, he kept getting asked to return on further missions.
Born on April 3, 1934, in London, England, Jane Goodall set out to Tanzania in 1960 to study wild chimpanzees. She immersed herself in their lives, bypassing more rigid procedures to make discoveries about primate behavior that have continued to shape scientific discourse.
A highly respected member of the world scientific community, she advocates for ecological preservation through the Jane Goodall Institute.
Jane Goodall And Friend
The general public was introduced to Jane Goodall’s life work via Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, first broadcast on American television on December 22, 1965. Filmed by her first husband, and narrated by Orson Welles, the documentary showed the shy but determined young English woman patiently watching these animals in their natural habitat, and the chimpanzees soon became a staple of American and British public television.
In 2017, additional footage from the Miss Goodall shooting was pieced together for Jane, a documentary that included recent interviews with the famed activist to create a more encompassing narrative of her experiences with the chimps.
“Chimpanzees have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.”
Many of Goodall’s endeavors are conducted under the auspices of the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the protection of chimpanzees and strong environmental practices. Founded in 1977, the organization is based in Virginia but boasts some two dozen offices around the world.
Tanzania In Africa
In July 1960, accompanied by her mother and an African cook, Jane Goodall arrived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Gombe Stream Reserve of Tanzania, Africa, with the goal of studying chimpanzees.
Goodall’s first attempts to closely observe the animals failed; she could get no nearer than 500 yards before the chimps fled. After finding another suitable group to follow, she established a nonthreatening pattern of observation, appearing at the same time every morning on the high ground near a feeding area along the Kakombe Valley.
The chimpanzees soon tolerated her presence and, within a year, allowed her to move as close as 30 feet to their feeding area. After two years of seeing her every day, they showed no fear and often came to her in search of bananas.
Baby In Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania
Goodall used her newfound acceptance to establish what she termed the “banana club,” a daily systematic feeding method she used to gain trust and to obtain a more thorough understanding of everyday chimpanzee behavior. Using this method, she became closely acquainted with a majority of the reserve’s chimps. She imitated their behaviors, spent time in the trees and ate their foods.
By remaining in almost constant contact with the chimps, Goodall discovered a number of previously unobserved behaviors: She noted that chimps have a complex social system, complete with ritualized behaviors and primitive but discernible communication methods, including a primitive “language” system containing more than 20 individual sounds.
She is credited with making the first recorded observations of chimpanzees eating meat and using and making tools. Tool making was previously thought to be an exclusively human trait.
Goodall also noted that chimpanzees throw stones as weapons, use touch and embraces to comfort one another and develop long-term familial bonds. The male plays no active role in family life but is part of the group’s social stratification: The chimpanzee “caste” system places the dominant males at the top, with the lower castes often acting obsequiously in their presence, trying to ingratiate themselves to avoid possible harm. The male’s rank is often related to the intensity of his entrance performance at feedings and other gatherings.
Upending the belief that chimps were exclusively vegetarian, Goodall witnessed chimps stalking, killing and eating large insects, birds and some bigger animals, including baby baboons and bushbucks (small antelopes).
On one occasion, she recorded acts of cannibalism.
In another instance, she observed chimps inserting blades of grass or leaves into termite hills to insects onto the blade. In true toolmaker fashion, they modified the grass to achieve a better fit, then used the grass as a long-handled spoon to eat the termites.
Goodall’s fieldwork led to the publication of numerous articles and books. In the Shadow of Man, her first major work, appeared in 1971.
In The Shadow Of Man
The book, essentially a field study of chimpanzees, effectively bridged the gap between scientific treatise and popular entertainment. Her vivid prose brought the chimps to life, revealing an animal world of social drama, comedy and tragedy, although her tendency to attribute human behaviors and names to chimpanzees struck some critics being as manipulative.
Goodall outlined the moral dilemma of keeping chimpanzees captive in her 1990 book, Through a Window: “The more we learn of the true nature of nonhuman animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man—whether this be in entertainment, as ‘pets,’ for food, in research laboratories or any of the other uses to which we subject them,” she wrote.
Through A Window
“This concern is sharpened when the usage in question leads to intense physical or mental suffering—as is so often true with regard to vivisection.”
Jane Goodall Shares The Love In Touching Hug
Her 1989 work, The Chimpanzee Family Book, written specifically for children, sought to convey a more humane view of wildlife. The book received the 1989 UNICEF/UNESCO Children’s Book of the Year Award, and Goodall used the prize money to have the text translated into Swahili and French and distributed throughout Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi.
The Chimpanzee Family Book
In March 2013, Goodall attracted media attention for her book Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the Plants, with Gail Hudson. The book had not yet hit store shelves when Goodall was accused of plagiarism. According to The Washington Post, the famed scientist borrowed sections from Wikipedia and other sources in her new book without giving them proper credit.
The publisher subsequently announced the release of the book would be delayed to address the unattributed sections. Goodall, through a statement from her institute, apologized for these unintentional mistakes: “This was a long and well researched book, and I am distressed to discover that some of the excellent and valuable sources were not properly cited, and I want to express my sincere apologies,” she said. Seeds of Hope was reissued in 2014.
In 1962, Baron Hugo van Lawick (1937-2002), a Dutch wildlife photographer and filmmaker, was sent to Africa by the National Geographic Society to film Goodall at work. The assignment ran longer than anticipated and the couple fell in love; they were married on March 28, 1964, and their European honeymoon marked one of the rare occasions on which Goodall was absent from Gombe Stream. In 1967, she gave birth to a son, Hugo Eric Louis, known as “Grub.”
After divorcing van Lawick in 1974, Goodall was married to Derek Bryceson (1922-1980), a member of Tanzania’s parliament and director of its national parks, until his death from cancer.
Jane Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London, England, to Mortimer Herbert Goodall, a businessperson and motor-racing enthusiast, and the former Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, who wrote novels under the name Vanne Morris Goodall. Along with her sister, Judy, Goodall was reared in London and Bournemouth, England.
Goodall’s fascination with animal behavior began in early childhood. In her leisure time, she observed native birds and animals, making extensive notes and sketches, and read widely in the literature of zoology and ethology. From an early age, she dreamed of traveling to Africa to observe exotic animals in their natural habitats.
Goodall attended the Uplands private school, receiving her school certificate in 1950 and a higher certificate in 1952. She went on to find employment as a secretary at Oxford University, and in her spare time also worked at a London-based documentary film company to finance a long-anticipated trip to Africa.
At the invitation of a childhood friend, Goodall visited South Kinangop, Kenya, in the late 1950s. Through other friends, she soon met the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey, then curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Leakey hired her as a secretary and invited her to participate in an anthropological dig at the now famous Olduvai Gorge, a site rich in fossilized prehistoric remains of early ancestors of humans. Additionally, Goodall was sent to study the vervet monkey, which lives on an island in Lake Victoria.
Leakey believed that a long-term study of the behavior of higher primates would yield important evolutionary information. He had a particular interest in the chimpanzee, the second most intelligent primate. Few studies of chimpanzees had been successful; either the size of the safari frightened the chimps, producing unnatural behaviors, or the observers spent too little time in the field to gain comprehensive knowledge.
Leakey believed that Goodall had the proper temperament to endure long-term isolation in the wild. At his prompting, she agreed to attempt such a study. Many experts objected to Leakey’s selection of Goodall because she had no formal scientific education and lacked even a general college degree.
Professorships and Educating the Public
Goodall’s academic credentials were solidified when she received a Ph.D. in ethology from Cambridge University in 1965; she was just the eighth person in the university’s long history permitted to pursue a Ph.D. without first earning a baccalaureate degree.
Goodall subsequently held a visiting professorship in psychiatry at Stanford University from 1970 to 1975, and in 1973, she was appointed to her longtime position of honorary visiting professor of zoology at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
After attending a 1986 conference in Chicago that focused on the ethical treatment of chimpanzees, Goodall began directing her energies toward educating the public about the wild chimpanzee’s endangered habitat and about the unethical treatment of chimpanzees that are used for scientific research.
To preserve the wild chimpanzee’s environment, Goodall encourages African nations to develop nature-friendly tourism programs, a measure that makes wildlife into a profitable resource.
She actively works with business and local governments to promote ecological responsibility.
Goodall’s stance is that scientists must try harder to find alternatives to the use of animals in research. She has openly declared her opposition to militant animal rights groups who engage in violent or destructive demonstrations. Extremists on both sides of the issue, she believes, polarize thinking and make constructive dialogue nearly impossible.
While reluctantly resigned to the continuation of animal research, she feels that young scientists must be educated to treat animals more compassionately.
“By and large,” she has written, “students are taught that it is ethically acceptable to perpetrate, in the name of science, what, from the point of view of animals, would certainly qualify as torture.”
In recognition of her achievements, Goodall has received numerous honors and awards, including the Gold Medal of Conservation from the San Diego Zoological Society in 1974, the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize in 1984, the Schweitzer Medal of the Animal Welfare Institute in 1987, the National Geographic Society Centennial Award in 1988, and the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences in 1990.
She points to the Trump administration, which has been overturning checks and balances that have been put in place by previous administrations. “I’m totally shocked,” she says. What would she say to President Donald Trump, if given the chance? “I’m told I would have 30 seconds max to get any point across, and I’m not sure what I could say in 30 seconds that would make the slightest bit of difference.”
Jane’s work continues.
Please support her work through the Jane Goodall Institute
The Texas landscape is littered with thousands of ranches where the sole crop is Death. The owners of these ranches earn their living by selling the lives of others – captive animals- for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to “hunters” with a bloodlust that neither number of victims or circumstances of their death can quench.
Born To Die: Hunters Pay To Kill Captive Animals In Texas
And Hitler justified, in his own mind and in the minds of his death camp personnel, that the murder of Jews was for the purpose of “purifying” Germany and greater Europe. His idea of a noble purpose for monstrous crimes.
In the same spirit the wardens of the death ranches in Texas run their businesses, justify the suffering and death they are paid to cause and care not for the animals they have imprisoned on their own version of death row.
The ranch’s hunting guides and managers walk a thin, controversial line between caring for thousands of rare, threatened and endangered animals and helping to execute them. Some see the ranch as a place for sport and conservation. Some see it as a place for slaughter and hypocrisy. — New York Times
Hunters Pay Texas Death Camp Ranchers Thousands Of Dollars to Kill Captive Exotic Animals
Born To Die: Hunters Pay To Kill Captive Animals In Texas
Price lists clearly show the price placed on the heads of captive animals in Texas:
Happy Couple Pose Over Dead Body Of Zebra They Shot Dead
Ranchers in the nation’s top cattle-raising state have been transforming pasture land into something out of an African safari, largely to lure trophy hunters who pay top-dollar kill fees to hunt exotics. — New York Times
Killing Captive Lions Involves Neither Sport Nor Athletic Ability. The Only Requirement Is A Fat Bank Account
“The domestic wildlife trade is the dirty underbelly of trophy hunting industry,” said Kitty Block, CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, an animal welfare group that opposes the practice. Block described the hunting of exotics in the U.S. as canned hunts, motivated by the desire to obtain a so-called trophy.
“Animals are fenced-in, hand-reared, hand-fed, and they’re baited so food is out when hunters come,” Block told CBS News. “Hunters are then driven up to the area where animal is eating and they’re shot there.”
This form of “hunting,” any hunting really, makes me very angry. Angry and disappointed that animal cruelty like this can exist in the United States in the 21st century.
I realize there are people who would rather not know about these death camps for animals, see pictures of the maimed and dead animals, but none of us can work to change what we don’t know exists. People are visual. We have to see to believe. And seeing we believe. Believing we become woke – energized to change the system.
Wise Words From Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp is spot on. We need to see. We need to believe. We need to stop the violence.
The Texas legislature is not immune to phone calls, postcards, petitions from animal rights activists. Take the time to do something – even a small something – to save captive animals from a cruel death in Texas.
“Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47,” the Stoner family told NBC News. “He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.”
“While it can’t spray bullets like a machine gun in movies, it does reload quickly, allowing shooters to fire as fast and as often as they can pull the trigger.”
One of the coolest things about the AR-15 is that it can be tailored to suit your style and needs. It is customizable for any purpose and has readily swappable parts, aka “furniture.” This includes aesthetics as well as more purpose-driven parts. – A Devoted Fan
“AR-15s are designed to kill multiple enemy combatants at once,” said Frank Smyth, weapons expert and founder of GJS, an organization that trains journalists for combat reporting. “But of course in the hands of an active shooter or an individual that was targeting civilians, it’s a tactical weapon. It enables them to target multiple people in a quick period of time.”
The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naïve or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye — or perhaps another body part.” – Donald Trump
Why? It all goes back to the campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for president of the United States.
Goldwater was the Republican candidate running against President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s campaign team painted Goldwater as a dangerous extremist unfit for the presidency.
A magazine, Fact, then in print asked American psychiatrists about Goldwater’s fitness and mental health.
The results infuriated Goldwater and raised questions regarding the ethics of psychiatrists diagnosing someone who was never their patient nor with whom they had any personal contact.
Following the election – Goldwater lost – the Arizona senator sued Fact for libel. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Fact lost, and later ceased publication.
The American Psychiatric Association was bloodied and bruised in the process of the Fact libel suit, which involved a sizable number of its membership.
The American Psychiatric Association, to ensure there would never be a Goldwater-diagnose-from-a-distance problem put in place the Goldwater Rule.
“I don’t think that, without an examination of an individual, one can make an assessment of the person’s psychological profile,” said Maria A. Oquendo, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who is also president of the American Psychiatric Association.
Just a reminder, the Goldwater rule applies to psychiatrists, who are medical doctors. Other mental health professionals operate under other guidelines.
Although the following response of the president of the American Psychological Association is helpful in understanding the stance of that organization.
The American Psychological Association does not have a Goldwater Rule per se, but our Code of Ethics clearly warns psychologists against diagnosing any person, including public figures, whom they have not personally examined. Specifically, it states: “When psychologists provide public advice or comment via print, Internet or other electronic transmission, they take precautions to ensure that statements (1) are based on their professional knowledge, training or experience in accord with appropriate psychological literature and practice; (2) are otherwise consistent with this Ethics Code; and (3) do not indicate that a professional relationship has been established with the recipient.”
Sigmund Freud himself would never have imagined a curious citizenry consumed with psychiatric insights into an erratic president.
So is the president of the United States insane?
Unfit for office?
Ripe for removal under the 25th Amendment to our Constitution?
Amendment XXV
Section 1.
In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.
Section 2.
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
Section 3.
Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.
Section 4.
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
With psychiatrists and other mental health professionals ethically bound not to make pronouncements on the president, with a Republican majority in the Cabinet and the Congress, at least from a mental health point of view Donald Trump will be tweeting from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue through 2020.
P.S. Despite the opinion of the psychiatrists of the day, guess who was a big backer of Senator Barry Goldwater?
Despite her current status as a Democratic icon, former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had some significant exposure to conservative politics in her youth. In her autobiography Living History, Clinton described her father as a “rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it” and noted that she had been a Young Republican and a supporter of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater.
With the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, the issue of American “Sanctuary Cities” is front page news. That, and a brewing crisis.
Donald Trump
But before the current controversy, a little background. The concept of sanctuary is not new. The following article examines sanctuary in medieval English law.
Designation as a sanctuary city did not begin in the last few years. From the mid-1980s, Chicago, Illinois, designated itself as a sanctuary city. And the heart of the decision was not Hispanic.
Chicago’s History As A Sanctuary City
San Francisco, California took a different route to its sanctuary city designation. And that came with a horrible tragedy.
Feelings run deep on the issue of sanctuary cities. Americans are divided on the issue and have varying perspective on the legal and moral issue involved.
So, what’s happening now with the start of the Trump presidency?
Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician-scientist who was recognized for discovering penicillin. The simple discovery and use of the antibiotic agent has saved millions of lives, and earned Fleming – together with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who devised methods for the large-scale isolation and production of penicillin – the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine.
BEGINNINGS
On August 6, 1881, Alexander Fleming was born to Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton in Lochfield Farm, Scotland. Initially schooled in Scotland, Fleming eventually moved to London with three brothers and a sister, and completed his youth education at the Regent Street Polytechnic. He did not enter medical school immediately after; instead, he worked in a shipping office for four years. When his uncle John died, he willed equal shares of his estate to his siblings, nieces and nephews, and Fleming was able to use his share to pursue a medical education. In 1906, he graduated with distinction from St Mary’s Medical School at London University.
FORTUNATE CHOICES
Fleming did not intend to begin a career in research. While serving as a private in the London Scottish Regiment of the Territorial Army, he became a recognized marksman. Wishing to keep Fleming in St Mary’s to join its rifle club, the club’s captain convinced him to pursue a career in research rather than in surgery, as the latter choice would require him to leave the school. The captain introduced him to Sir Almroth Wright, a keen club member and a pioneer in immunology and vaccine research, who agreed to take Fleming under his wing. It was with this research group that Fleming stayed throughout his entire career.
When World War I broke out, Fleming served in the Army Medical Corps as a captain. During this time, he observed the death of many of his fellow soldiers, not always from wounds inflicted in battle, but from the ensuing infection that could not be controlled. The primary means to combat infection was antiseptics, which frequently did more harm than good. In an article he wrote during this time, Fleming discussed the presence of anaerobic bacteria in deep wounds, which proliferated despite antiseptics. Initially, his research was not accepted, but Fleming continued undaunted and in 1922, he discovered lysozyme, an enzyme with weak antibacterial properties. History tells us that, while infected with a cold, Fleming transferred some of his nasopharyngeal mucus onto a Petri dish. Not known for fastidious laboratory organization, he placed the dish among the clutter at his desk and left it there, forgotten, for two weeks. In that time, numerous colonies of bacteria grew and proliferated. However, the area where the mucus had been inoculated remained clear. Upon further investigation, Fleming discovered the presence of a substance in the mucus that inhibited bacterial growth and he named it lysozyme. He also discovered lysozyme in tears, saliva, skin, hair and fingernails. He was soon able to isolate larger amounts of lysozyme from egg white, but in subsequent experiments found that this enzyme was effective against only a small number of non-harmful bacteria. Nevertheless, this would lay the groundwork for Fleming’s next great discovery.
‘MOLD JUICE’
In 1928, Fleming began a series of experiments involving the common staphylococcal bacteria. An uncovered Petri dish sitting next to an open window became contaminated with mold spores. Fleming observed that the bacteria in proximity to the mold colonies were dying, as evidenced by the dissolving and clearing of the surrounding agar gel. He was able to isolate the mold and identified it as a member of the Penicillium genus. He found it to be effective against all Gram-positive pathogens, which are responsible for diseases such as scarlet fever, pneumonia, gonorrhea, meningitis and diphtheria. He discerned that it was not the mold itself but some ‘juice’ it had produced that had killed the bacteria. He named the ‘mold juice’ penicillin. Later, he would say: “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”
Although Fleming published the discovery of penicillin in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929, the scientific community greeted his work with little initial enthusiasm. Additionally, Fleming found it difficult to isolate this precious ‘mold juice’ in large quantities. It was not until 1940, just as he was contemplating retirement, that two scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, became interested in penicillin. In time, they were able to mass-produce it for use during World War II.
Fleming received many awards for his achievements. In 1928, he became Professor of Bacteriology at St Mary’s. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943 and elevated to the level of Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology at the University of London in 1948. A recipient of some thirty honorary degrees, in 1945, he won the most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. He was made a Knight Bachelor by King George VI in 1944 and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise in 1948. Time Magazine named Fleming one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.
“In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them.”
― Michael Pollan
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But will a psychiatrist tell you?
Goldwater was the Republican candidate running against President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s campaign team painted Goldwater as a dangerous extremist unfit for the presidency.
The results infuriated Goldwater and raised questions regarding the ethics of psychiatrists diagnosing someone who was never their patient nor with whom they had any personal contact.
