Positive Externalities of Terror

Leave it to our favorite Canuck to look on the bright side of car bombings and missile attacks: See, all the terrorism in Iraq is good, cos it’ll teach the Arabs to hate terrorism.

5 thoughts on “Positive Externalities of Terror”

  5. It encompasses a range of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness.
    Contemporary medicine applies health science, biomedical research, and medical technology to diagnose and treat injury and disease, typically through medication, surgery, or some other form of therapy.
    The word medicine is derived from the Latin ars medicina, meaning the art of healing.
    Though medical technology and clinical expertise are pivotal to contemporary medicine, successful face-to-face relief of actual suffering continues to require the application of ordinary human feeling and compassion, known in English as bedside manner.
    As science and technology developed, medicine became more reliant upon medications. Pharmacology developed from herbalism and many drugs are still derived from plants (atropine, ephedrine, warfarin, aspirin, digoxin, vinca alkaloids, taxol, hyoscine, etc). The first of these was arsphenamine / Salvarsan discovered by Paul Ehrlich in 1908 after he observed that bacteria took up toxic dyes that human cells did not. Vaccines were discovered by Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur. The first major class of antibiotics was the sulfa drugs, derived by French chemists originally from azo dyes. This has become increasingly sophisticated; modern biotechnology allows drugs targeted towards specific physiological processes to be developed, sometimes designed for compatibility with the body to reduce side-effects. Genomics and knowledge of human genetics is having some influence on medicine, as the causative genes of most monogenic genetic disorders have now been identified, and the development of techniques in molecular biology and genetics are influencing medical technology, practice and decision-making.

    AddonS^
    Sahachiro Hata discovered the anti-syphilitic activity of this compound in 1908 in the laboratory of Paul Ehrlich, during a survey of hundreds of newly synthesized organic arsenical compounds. Ehrlich had theorized that by screening many compounds a drug could be discovered with anti-microbial activity. Ehrlich’s team began their search for such a “magic bullet” among chemical derivatives of the dangerously toxic drug atoxyl. This was the first organized team effort to optimize the biological activity of a lead compound through systematic chemical modifications, the basis for nearly all modern pharmaceutical research.

    Arsphenamine was marketed under the trade name Salvarsan in 1910. It was also called 606, because it was the 606th compound synthesized for testing Germany it was the practice to designate compounds by their development number. Another compound known commonly in Germany by its number is Parathion, which was the 605th compound to be developed in search for insecticide. It is commonly known as E605 (E stands for Entwicklungsnummer (German for “development number”)]. Salvarsan was the first organic anti-syphillitic, and a great improvement over the inorganic mercury compounds that had been used previously. A more soluble (but slightly less effective) arsenical compound, Neosalvarsan, (neoarsphenamine), became available in 1912. These arsenical compounds came with considerable risk of side effects, and they were supplanted as treatments for syphilis in the 1940s by penicillin.

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