* In 1915, Tesla and Edison were corecipients of the Nobel Prize. When each man adamantly refused to share the award with the other, it was presented to neither and passed to the father-and-son team of William and Lawrence Bragg for their work in radiology, which Tesla had also pioneered.
* I do not count President Jefferson’s deployment of sailors in 1801 (and again under Madison in 1815) during the brief and intermittent Barbary Wars against North African Ottoman pirates.
* This hard-won self-rule came only after the 1942 Japanese invasion and American evacuation, a harsh Japanese occupation, and an American reinvasion and return in 1944 during the Second World War.
* Reed’s paid test subjects were made aware of the risks and, for the first time in medical history, signed consent forms, setting the precedent for the common and legal use of these documents.
* Although Finlay was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times, he never won the prestigious award.
* The US controlled the canal until 1977, when Panama slowly began administration in a joint operation with the US, until a complete handover to Panama was finalized in 1999.
* DDT: dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane
* On the Macedonian/Salonika Front, for example, the British and French facing off against the Bulgarians were ravaged by malaria. “Regret that my army is in hospital with malaria,” replied the French commander when ordered to attack in October 1915. “One cannot do something with nothing.” Roughly 50% of the French force of 120,000 contracted malaria. From a British force of 160,000 men, there were 163,000 admissions for malaria (more than one per man). An embedded journalist described the British soldiers as “listless, anemic, unhappy, sallow men whose lives were a physical burden to them and a material burden to the Army.” When the Bulgarians finally surrendered in September 1918, the Allied Army had lost 2 million service days to malaria on this Salonika Front. The British penetration along the Eastern Mediterranean Levant from Egypt north through Palestine to Syria, led by General Edmund Allenby, as mentioned, was harassed by malaria but not as violently as expected, thanks in part to Allenby’s hounding insistence on exploiting quinine, mosquito netting, and high terrain. Of the 2.5 million British imperial troops who served across North Africa, the Middle East, Gallipoli, and the southern Russian Caucasus, only 110,000 cases of malaria were reported. Conversely, malaria preyed on the opposing undersupplied and starving Ottoman-Turkish defenders with more zeal, infecting some 460,000 troops.
* Civilian deaths are imprecise and debated but generally fall between 7 and 10 million.
* The whereabouts of patient zero for this epidemic of “Spanish Flu” remains hotly contested among academics. While it certainly did not originate in Spain, theories place its roots in Boston, Kansas, France, Austria, or China. Boston appears to be the most likely.
* Originally invented and promoted as an insecticide, Zyklon B would become notorious for its use by the Nazis as the chemical agent used for the mass murder of Jews and other prisoners during the atrocities of the Holocaust.
* Atabrine was also known as mepacrine and quinacrine.
* Recently, attention has been drawn to contemporary military personnel and permanent psychosis caused by mefloquine, the same antimalarial that gave me trippy, psychedelic dreams in 2004.
* During the war, the Hershey Chocolate Company churned out 3 billion “D Ration” or “Tropical” bars. By 1945, the production plant was dispensing 24 million units per week.
* Geisel also drew the Seuss-like characters and artwork for the advertisements of the DDT-based insecticide FLIT with the tagline and popular catchphrase “Quick, Henry! The Flit.” He also cartooned posters for Esso and Standard Oil.
* Following the “trio of discoveries” in 1897 by Ross, Grassi, and Koch, during its infancy the international scientific world of malariology was small. Schilling, for example, was the first-ever director of the Tropical Medicine Division from 1905 to 1936 at the Robert Koch Institute, founded by our germ theorist in 1891 as a think tank and research station for the study and prevention of disease. Upon retirement in 1936, Schilling accepted a post in Mussolini’s Italy to conduct malaria experiments on the inmates of psychiatric asylums and hospitals.
* Of the roughly 1,000 test subjects used by Schilling, over 400 died from mosquito-borne disease or lethal doses of experimental synthetic antimalarial drugs.
* By comparison, during the Korean War, there were 35,000 cases of malaria among US troops between 1950 and 1953.
* If global warming trends and predictions hold true, by 2050, add another 600 million people to this total.
* CRISPR: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
* Subsequent investigators reported that the “CRISPR twins” might have had their brains inadvertently (or perhaps purposefully) enhanced in the process.
* Estimates are tricky and span a wide range. I frequently came across the common numbers of 8.7 million and 11 million. I also found academic research citing 2 billion, 1 trillion, and everything in between, with 40 million insect species alone. Like the living organisms in question, taxonomy is also a work in progress and is continuously evolving.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
The Mosquito Page 58