Jay Walker

Library of Human Imagination

by William H. Benson

July 2, 2015

     In 2002, the multi-millionaire Jay Walker designed and built his Library of Human Imagination. Located in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Walker’s 3,600 square-foot home stores and displays his collection of books—over 50,000 volumes—plus his myriad of museum-quality artifacts. Thus, it is both library and museum. Wired magazine said that “it is the most amazing library in the world,” and after seeing pictures and videos of it, I agree.

     First, Walker drew his inspiration for the library’s floor tile from the twentieth-century designer, M. C. Escher. The tile design that Walker created reveals a tumbling, wooden-block pattern that creates a three-dimensional effect. Then, from the floor one can look upwards and see stairs that connect the library’s three levels. Books stand in shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling against the outer walls, but certain of the rarest books are opened and displayed on tables.

     Walker’s most stunning effect is his dazzling display of glass throughout the library. Partial glass walls, no more than four-foot tall, surround visitors, who feel as if they are walking through a maze. Walker commissioned artists who then etched the glass walls with specific designs, such as the binary code, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chinese symbols. Then, by directing blue, green, red, or yellow lights at the glass, Walker creates an eery, but overpowering sensation.

     As for his artifacts, Walker likes to juxtaposition two items. For example, one can see an original copy of Robert Hooke’s book, Micrographia, published in 1665, that listed illustrations of bacteria as seen through a microscope. Nearby stands an early book on dwarfs. Small life forms, and small people.

     Then, in a TED Talk, Walker points to a four-foot high scale of a DNA molecule, and beside it sits an Enigma machine used to decode the Nazi’s communications. Walker describes the former as the code for life, and the latter as the code for death.

     On another TED Talk, Walker holds up his Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed on Gutenberg’s printing press, but Walker points out that that Bible was not printed for reading, because, “in 1455, nobody could read.” What then prompted the invention of the printing press? Walker answers by holding up a single sheet of printed paper, an indulgence.

      To raise money, Walker said, the Church sold a piece of paper that promised the purchaser less time in Purgatory, following his or her death. Once the Church began printing indulgences instead of drafting them by hand, it was like printing money. Walker says, “The religion drove the technology.”

     Hanging from the ceiling is an un-launched Sputnik satellite, and also a chandelier from a James Bond movie, Die Another Day. In a case stands a dinosaur’s hefty thigh-bone, and on a table stands a complete skeleton of a juvenile raptor.

     A visitor can see both old and new in Walker’s library: a meteorite, a U. S. flag carried to the moon and back, Franklin Roosevelt’s napkin on which he drafted his plan to win the war, a clutch of fossilized dinosaur eggs, a 1535 Coverdale Bible, an edition of Chaucer, and an instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the moon.

     In recent years, Walker acquired an anastatic facsimile copy of the Declaration of Independence, one of the two known to exist. In the early 1840’s, John Jay Smith brought the anastatic technique to America from England. There he had learned to apply chemicals and a copper plate to an original document. The ink from the document would soak onto the copper plate, and then printers could print copies from that copper plate.

     It is not certain if Walker’s facsimile was reproduced from the original Declaration of Independence, which would explain the original’s current poor quality, or from a subsequent engraving. Either way, the words on the anastatic copy underscore the intent of the fifty-six Congressmen who signed the document in early July of 1776, that they wished to sever all political allegiance to England’s monarch, King George III. “When in the course of human events,” and “We hold these truths to be self-evident”

     In the history of humankind or in the Library of Human Imagination, little is of more importance than independence, the idea that the people should govern themselves, free of a ruling monarch, and do so by forming laws that they all can read and obey. Slavery begins when others tell the people what to do, say, or think, but freedom begins when the people think and behave as they want. Thomas Paine called that simple idea, Common Sense.

     In the fifteenth century, indulgences freed people from Purgatory in the after-life, but in the eighteenth century, the Declaration of Independence freed the colonists and gave them permission to create their own government in this life.

     Jay Walker, curator at the Library of Human Imagination, said, “We create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli, with history, and with human achievement.” In his library the stimuli includes plates of etched glass bathed in light and colored blue, green, red, or yellow, as well as historical documents. Together they dazzle the imagination.  Enjoy the 4^th of July!

Suki Kim and Fathers’ Day

by William H. Benson

June 18, 2015

     On Sunday, June 25, 1950, North Korean bombs fell on Seoul, South Korea’s capital, and the civil war began. It ended three years later, on July 27, 1953, with the same division as it had begun, with the Korean peninsula divided into two parts at the 38^th parallel, Communist to the North and a democratic-republic to the South. South Koreans now call the war, “the 6-2-5 Upheaval,” but the North Koreans call it “the Fatherland Liberation War,” even though no fatherland was ever liberated.

     In 2011, Suki Kim, a Korean-American woman, then forty-one years old, taught English in Pyongyang, North Korea. In 2014, she published her memoir, Without You, There is No Us, and in it she described her 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a North Korean college for boys, funded by donations raised by evangelical American Christians. PUST’s teachers were all foreigners, and officials watched them closely.

     Suki explained her situation, “I lived undercover in North Korea, posing as an English teacher. I was born and raised in South Korea, their enemy. I now live in America, their other enemy.”

     The teachers’ “counterparts” and “minders” refused to allow any discussion of religion or missionary work or anything that conflicted with the official party ideology, which, Suki said, was the lie that North Korea is “the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation.”

     She said that North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation, and that PUST was a heavily-guarded prison posing as a school. Her students knew very little of the outside world. For example, they did not know of the world wide web, which made it not quite “world wide.” The students were not permitted to leave the school, and were not allowed to communicate with or see their parents.

     Every book, song, advertisement, newspaper article, and picture was about Kim Jong-Il. Every blank wall space in the school was covered with his picture.

     Suki tried to teach these boys better skills in English composition, but her job was difficult. How could she teach twenty-year-old men how to think and then write an essay, or voice an opinion? All their lives their minders had told them what to think, do, say, and believe, and that they must obey. Critical thinking and truth-telling were not prized commodities in North Korea.

     Officials watched the students’ every move, heard their every word, disallowed them to express their thoughts, and reported all that they did or said. All students knew that if they would commit a single mistake, “unimaginable consequences” from this merciless and brutal regime would result.

     To help her students feel more comfortable with the truth, Suki played the game “Truth and Lies” with them, and then she asked them to write pretend letters to family members. Feeling pressured to obey her assignments, the students often reverted to lies. “When I was in the fifth grade, I cloned a rabbit,” or “I visited China on vacation.” Both were lies. Every knows that no one leaves North Korea.

     Suki grew to adore her students. When she called them “gentlemen,” they giggled and blushed. They understood that “she wanted them to live gentle lives,” which she knew was difficult in that repressive country. There was little she could tell them about life in South Korea or America.

     Americans call the Korean War, the “Forgotten War,” but no Korean can forget the war. The civil war divided families, and caused pain-wracked separations. Mothers lost their sons, wives lost their husbands, and children lost their brothers, never to see or speak or write to them ever again. Once captured, there was no release program. All communication ceased.

     Sixty-five years ago, on June 25, “everything went wrong” inside Korea.

     The Oklahoma National Guard drafted my dad in October of 1950, a month after his wedding. Army officials told him that he now belonged to the 45^th Infantry Division, 180^th Infantry Regiment, First Battalion, Company C. He went through basic training at Camp Polk, Louisiana, and in April of 1951, a ship carried him through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean to Hokkaido, Japan.

     In December of 1951, he landed in Korea and was given the job of mechanic, repairing army jeeps and trucks. In August of that same year, after eight months in Korea, he was released from duty and returned home, carrying with him one overwhelming wish, to forget the entire experience and never talk about it. He hated the military. He hated the drill sergeants. He hated others telling him what to do. He hated the war, and he hated being in Korea.

     Yet, he was fortunate, even lucky. Whereas tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Koreans lost their lives, he lived and was reunited with family, friends, and home.

     Fathers’ Day is Sunday. Enjoy the day, remember your father, speak to him if you can, and think of the freedoms we enjoy in the United States of America. At the very least, you and I can tell the truth, and we can write an opinion column.

Futurology

by William H. Benson

June 4, 2015

     Fred and Wilma Flintstone lived in the past, George and Jane Jetson will live in the future, and Ralph and Alice Kramden live in the present. Although “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were animated, the three fictional sitcoms, including “The Honeymooners,” follow similar story lines.

     The husbands work at jobs: Fred on a rock pile, George at Spacely’s Space Rockets, and Ralph as a bus driver. Their wives—Wilma, Jane, and Alice—stay at home. The comedy occurred in the characters’ home, at their work, or with their neighbors. Barney Rubble was Ed Norton in cartoon form. The three sitcoms demonstrate how unchangeable human life is in the past, present, or future.

     Whereas a historian measures social and political change over time, his counterpart, the futurist, imagines change by gathering facts from the past and then extrapolates them into the future. 

     Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything does not happen at once.”

     Mad Max: Fury Road is George Miller’s dystopian vision of a grim future. Everywhere the land is red, dry, sandy, or rocky. A handful of women flee from a terrible present in the hope that they will find a better future “in the green fields.” The ruler and his henchmen pursue the women with a fury.

     Fast-paced the movie is. Everybody is in motion, riding in gigantic machines with enormous wheels, traveling forward, or racing backwards, fleeing, being chased, or pursuing. It is a series of over-the-top stunt-man sequences, and each outdoes the previous. The movie contains far more action than plot.

     Futurology includes at least five layers. First, it includes the ancient Jewish and Christian prophecies that scholars incorporate into a theology called eschatology. Second, it involves the seventeenth-century idea of social progress. Third, it presents scientific studies of societies, such as economics and sociology. Fourth, it describes utopias, where societies are located on an island or in a remote mountain valley, where people live in peace. Fifth, it produces science fiction.

     One person who addressed all five layers was the British thinker and writer H. G. Wells. Considered the founder of futurology, Wells “wove the strands of earlier futurism into a single body of work, more than one hundred volumes in all, and published over a span of more than fifty years.” Known more for his science fiction novels, such as The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds, he also wrote history in The Outline of History, and also biology in The Science of Life.

     In 1902, “the study of the future was born,” when H. G. Wells published his book Anticipations. In the first chapters he described a series of futuristic gadgets he imagined, but then he put those aside to predict the collapse of capitalism and nation states during years of unrelenting war, and the rise of “the technically competent, of the scientists and engineers, who would learn from their errors and build a world state of peace and plenty.” He wrote those words before either world war.

     In 1933, he wrote The Shape of Things to Come, a fictional history textbook that a historian named Dr. Philip Raven wrote in the year 2016. In it, Raven describes a world war that began in January 1940, when Germany invaded Poland. Because no single nation claimed an absolute victory, the war dragged on for ten years. Then, when all nations were exhausted and spent, a friendly dictatorship made a grasp for world control.

     So, Wells foresaw the approach of World War II, but he was wrong about the date. Nazi Germany did invade Poland, but on September 1, 1939, four months before the day Wells had predicted.

     In 1938, in his book World Brain, Wells described an international encyclopedia, “a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared.” Of his world brain, Wells said, “This is no remote dream, no fantasy. It is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs.” Wells died in 1946, some forty or more years before the advent of the World Wide Web.

     Futurists today point to an expansion of globalization, calling it “the dominant theme of modern life.” One author wrote that in this new century, “the human race has created a framework of capitalism, technology, trade, mass communications, and individual rights.” If a nation rejects that framework, its leaders are made to feel isolated and its citizens impoverished. “The more overtly intolerant a society is, the poorer it will be. It is intolerance that causes poverty.”

     War and domination and conquest will interfere in men and women’s futures, but when peace breaks out, people will revert to the same actions that their ancestors have followed for generations. Husbands and wives will go to work to provide a life for themselves and their children. Just like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, George and Jane Jetson, and Ralph and Alice Kramden, people need a roof over their heads, food to eat, and clothing to wear. The wives will try to tame their husband’s cantankerous dispositions, and the husbands will try to ignore their wives’ comments. Those things will not change in the future.

Pedro A. Noguera and The Trouble with Black Boys

by William H. Benson

May 21, 2015

     Pedro A. Noguera teaches education and sociology at New York University. The son of Caribbean immigrants, he has a Spanish name, but he is black. In 2008, he published his book, The Trouble with Black Boys, and within its pages, he lists the difficulties that young black males face in America.

     Noguera writes, “African-American men lead the nation in homicide, as both perpetrators and victims. Their incarceration, conviction, and arrest rates have been at the top of the charts in most states for some time.” He explains that among the numerous social groups, only black men have experienced a decline in life expectancy. “They are least likely to be hired, and most likely to be unemployed.”

     The poverty that young black men endure every day crushes their dreams for a better future, and so they dare not hope. Noguera says that “one out of three Black children is raised in a poor household.” Other writers have attempted to explain the reasons for the high level of inner city deprivation. 

     Scott Novak in The Baltimore Sun said that “Baltimore lost a staggering 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the second half of the 20^th century—most of them to other countries.” As a result, “only about 42 percent of adults in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood are employed.”

     Paul Krugman in The New York Times said that “Middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-calls jobs. The crumbling of traditional families in our country resulted from the disappearance of the well-paid blue-collar jobs that made men marriageable and provided real upward mobility.” Many young black men have disappeared.

     An editorial in The New York Times stated an appalling truth, that there are “1.5 million missing black men,” who have “disappeared from civic life because they died young or are locked away in prison. Only 83 black men live outside of jail for every 100 black women.”

     Noguera writes, “The number of African-American men killed on the streets of Oakland has nearly matched the number who graduated from its high schools ready to attend college.”

     He finds it remarkable that “schools most frequently punish the students who have the greatest academic, social, economic, and emotional needs.” Instead of striving to provide for those deprived students, “in many schools, there is a fixation with behavior management and social control that outweighs and overrides all other priorities and goals.”

     One day Noguera was walking through a school when the principal pointed to a child and said, “There’s a prison cell in San Quentin waiting for him.” Surprised, Noguera asked the principal, “What is the school doing to prevent him from going to prison?” Noguera concludes that “the failure of black males is so pervasive that it appears to be the norm and so does not raise alarms.”

     Last month a Newsweek writer provided a harsh assessment of the injustices heaped upon young black males. “Black men are this nation’s outcasts, marked like Oedipus for doom from birth. They are more likely to ditch school, more likely to be arrested, more likely to end up in prison. When they are not forgotten, they are feared. When they are not scorned, they are pitied.”

     Researchers have discovered that many black boys refuse to believe that education will lead to a better life, nor do they believe that their teachers—mainly white and female—provide much support. Christopher P. Chatmon, a black teacher, explained that “black boys have no will to succeed because they have little notion that someone who looks as they do could succeed.”

     If a black boy happens to read books, receive an “A,” display his mathematical skill, or reveal an interest in science, his peers will ridicule him, saying that he is “selling out, and going soft.” Noguera writes, “Black students hold themselves back out of fear that their peers will ostracize them,” and Newsweek said, “Fifteen-year-old boys of any race are an intractable bunch.”

     For an example, Noguera describes his son Joaquin, who was an ideal student. He enjoyed athletics, pulled A’s and B’s, and his teachers described him as “courteous and respectful.” Then, in the tenth grade he changed, and became angry, sullen, and irritable. He failed math and science. Pedro spent more time with his son, listened to him, and discovered two things.

     First, most of Joaquin’s friends had quit school because they did not receive much support at home, and they were failing their classes. So Joaquin felt alone, abandoned. Second, he felt that he had to act tough, even “intimidating and menacing,” on the street and in school, because if he acted “too nice, gentle, kind, or sincere,” others would see him as vulnerable and prey upon him.

     The good news is that by twelfth grade, “he seemed to snap out of his angry state,” and his grades improved. Noguera now suggests that “stereotypes had trapped his son and that he was desperate to figure out what it meant to be a young Black man.” Joaquin was lucky, because he had a dad who listened, but many other young black males do not.

     Immense forces are stacked against young black African-American males today, and so I find it rewarding to see some succeed at high school or college and graduate. My best wishes to them.

Lyrics and Graduation

by William H. Benson

May 7, 2015

     Fifty years ago, on the night of May 7, 1965, in a Florida hotel room, Keith Richards strummed his guitar while a cassette recorder taped a phrase that he had dreamed, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The next day he asked Mick Jagger to listen, and days later the Rolling Stones recorded the song.

     Mick and Keith had no idea what they had done. That song catapulted their band into superstar status, laid down one of the greatest pop hooks of all time, and now The Rolling Stone Magazine ranks that song as number two of the greatest rock and roll songs ever.

     Lyrics to a popular song are often just filler, background noise, there to provide a human voice, but with little thought. Often the writers design the song to hook a listener. The amplified words, electronic guitars, keyboards, and drums jump into a human brain, and there they churn, vibrate, and sizzle. Because so few can resist the lure, many wire themselves to the music via ear buds.

     Often the word jumble makes little sense, and no listener believes the writer or takes action because of a song’s lyrics. Sting stated his intention in the eighty-fourth greatest song. “Every breath you take, Every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I’ll be watching you.” I say that is a stalker’s confession, and so watch out for Sting.

     And what was Mick Jagger trying to say? “When I’m drivin’ in my car, And that man comes on the radio, And he’s tellin’ me more and more, About some useless information, Supposed to fire my imagination, I can’t get no, oh no no no, Hey hey hey that’s what I say, I can’t get no satisfaction.” He stated that modern American life bores him, and that he finds the news on the radio unsatisfactory.

     In 1976, the rock band Boston recorded the last song on the list, number 500. “I looked out this morning, and the sun was gone, Turned on some music to start my day, I lost myself in a familiar song, I closed my eyes, and I slipped away. It’s more than a feeling.”

     Question: what is more than a feeling?

     Possible answers: an opinion; a recognition of a truth not perceived before; an intelligent or perceptive thought; a fact backed up with solid documentation and verifiable evidence that is more than assertion. In the areas of thought and discourse, popular lyrics fall short.

     In October of 1971, John Lennon wrote and recorded his signature song “Imagine,” and Rolling Stone ranks it third among the greatest songs. Lennon’s lyrics exhibit some thought though when he imagines a different world. “No heaven, no hell below us, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no religion, all people living life in peace, no possessions, no greed, and no hunger.” Yes, you and I can imagine, but Lennon’s lyrics fail to offer suggestions to achieve his dream world.

      Rolling Stone ranks Bob Dylan’s song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” first among the greatest hits. Recorded in July of 1965, Dylan sings to a fictional character, Miss Lonely, whose life has changed. “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine, Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? Now you don’t talk so loud, Now you don’t seem so proud, About having to be scrounging your next meal.”

     Then, in the song’s chorus, he chides Miss Lonely. “How does it feel? How does it feel? To be without a home, Like a complete unknown, Like a rolling stone?” One commentator said that the song suggests “a loss of innocence and the harshness of experience,” and that “the myths, props, and old beliefs fall away to reveal a very taxing reality.” In other words, Dylan sings of vengeance.

     He jeers at this former sorority sister whose life has now faltered and crashed. Life’s circumstances has broken a once proud and haughty girl, and he enjoys seeing her anguish. Why would Rolling Stone‘s editors consider this cruel song the greatest?

     Universities will conduct graduation exercises this Saturday. The pride that the graduates will feel may give way to frustration and inner turmoil. Will they too become Miss Lonely? Will someone, like Bob Dylan, ridicule them and call them a rolling stone? Will someone, like Sting, be watching them? Given today’s job market, can any graduate get immediate or eventual satisfaction?

     In the weeks ahead, they may feel like Jackson Brown, who sang about “Running on Empty,” but I say that Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac offered the better advice, “You Can Go Your Own Way.”

     University graduation—a cap, a gown, and a diploma—is more than a feeling, and far more than a popular song’s lyrics. It is recognition of an accomplishment that astonishes both student and parent. What the student imagined four or more years before, she or he has now achieved. Best wishes and congratulations to all the university graduates. “We did it.”

Virus

by William H. Benson

April 23, 2015

     At a TED conference on March 18, in Vancouver, Bill Gates said, “If anything kills over ten million people in the next decades, it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than war; not missiles, but microbes. We are not ready for the next epidemic.”

     Gates pointed out that the Ebola virus killed 10,194 people in three west African countries this past year, but it could have killed far more. Gates said, “we were lucky that the Ebola virus did not spread through the air, and that it was limited to rural areas rather than urban.”

     Gates also said that the effort to contain Ebola demonstrated the need for a global comprehensive medical treatment system. “The Ebola epidemic was not a systems failure, but a lack of a system.” He suggested stronger health systems in poor countries, a medical corps organization, a pairing of military and medical personnel, a series of germ games rather than war games, and more vaccine research.

     Researchers are just now—a full year after the Ebola epidemic—testing vaccines for Ebola.

     A virus is small, about one hundredth the size of the average bacteria. It contains either RNA or DNA, a protein coat, and lipids. It is parasitic in that it lives inside a host, such as a plant, animal, or a bacteria. It possesses a drive to replicate, but if it kills off its host, it too dies.

     People have known of certain viruses—smallpox, rabies, poliovirus, and measles—for centuries, but others have merited more attention in recent years, such as swine flu, avian flu, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS, Hantavirus, West Nile, HIV, monkeypox, and Norovirus.

     Children suffer from chicken pox, mumps, and measles; but more elderly people suffer from shingles and West Nile. The chicken pox virus, or zoster, never leaves the body, but instead it lies dormant, poised to strike a second time as shingles. That virus causes a rash and also severe nerve pain, a symptom that chicken pox fails to manifest. Thus, the zoster virus evolves into another form.

     Some viruses—such as herpes simplex virus and Human Papillomavirus—infect hosts through sexual contact, but others are transmitted through contact with body fluids: blood, urine, saliva, and sweat. HIV infects its hosts through both sexual contact and tainted blood. Influenza spreads in the air through sneezes and coughs, or it can lie on a surface up to two days, waiting for someone to touch it.

     The tobacco ringworm virus infects both tobacco plants and soybeans, but when the honeybees gather pollen from the infected plants, they too become infected. Researchers now suspect that the former plant virus may have contributed to the bees’ CCD, or colony collapse disorder.

     Viruses strike different organs. Hepatitis, A through E, attacks the liver; and polio, West Nile, and viral meningitis attack the nervous system. Smallpox, measles, herpes, shingles, monkey pox, and dengue produce skin lesions, pustules, or rashes. Influenza strikes at the lungs and causes pneumonia.

     Rotavirus and Norovirus focuses its attack upon the gastrointestinal tract and causes diarrhea. Hantavirus can either attack the kidneys or the lungs. HIV disables the body’s immune system. Monkeypox causes the lymph nodes to swell, and mumps cause the salivary glands to swell.

     Many viruses though cause fever, headache, chills, body pain, nausea, and immense misery.

     The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people than any other epidemic in history. Bill Gates said that in 263 days 33,365,533 people died across the world. Pitiless, it often attacked men and women in their prime, between the ages of twenty and forty, an unheard of phenomenon. Most viruses attack children, the seniors, or those in a weakened condition.

     This strain of influenza first erupted in Haskell County, Kansas, west of Dodge City, in February of 1918. From there, certain soldiers—Dean Nilson, Ernest Elliot, and others—who were home on leave, carried it back with them to their army base, Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas, where it caused pneumonia in 237 men, and of those, thirty-eight died. It then raced through other army camps.

     Because of the World War, transport ships ferried troops across the Atlantic, and on April 10, the first appearance of this strain of influenza appeared in the French army, but then this strain died out both in France and the United States. In John Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza, he wrote that this pandemic “came in waves. The first spring wave killed a few, but the second wave would prove lethal.”

     Barry wrote that “biology is chaos. It is the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. It adapts and builds upon what already exists.” Between May and August in 1918, this influenza virus went dormant, but researchers now know that it was evolving into a more lethal killer.  

     The second wave erupted in August of 1918. Researchers suggest that “the ancestral virus responsible for the spring epidemics in the United States passaged and mutated, and that the process continued in France.” This second strain unleashed quick and ghastly consequences among the world’s armies and civilians. Millions would feel sick, and just hours later, pneumonia would strike them down.

     Bill Gates estimated that a similar pandemic today would cost an estimated $3,000,000,000, and millions would lose their lives. “There’s no need to panic,” he said, “but time is not on our side.”