Arthur Allen (born 1959 in Cincinnati, Ohio) [1] is an American author and journalist.
Allen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 with an AB in development studies. [1]
Since 1995, Allen has mainly written about biology and medicine. [1] He became a freelance writer in 1996, writing articles for a variety of publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Mother Jones, and Redbook. [2] [3] In 2007, his book Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver was published by W. W. Norton. [1] Additional books he has written include Ripe: The Search For The Perfect Tomato (2011), [4] and The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl (2014). [5] In 2014, Allen joined the Staff of Politico [2] as eHealth editor, writing and editing stories about heath IT. In March 2020 he left Politico and became an editor at Kaiser Health News.[ citation needed ]
Allen is married to The New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, with whom he has a son and a daughter. [2]
The year 1937 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl was a Polish biologist, physician and inventor, known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year between 1930 and 1934, and from 1936 to 1939.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Brian Laurence Deer is a British investigative journalist, best known for inquiries into the drug industry, medicine and social issues for The Sunday Times. Deer's investigative nonfiction book The Doctor Who Fooled the World, an exposé on disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield and the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, was published in September 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Waldemar Hoven was a Nazi physician at Buchenwald concentration camp, and convicted war criminal for conducting human experiments regarding typhus which led to the deaths of many concentration camp prisoners, and as one of the organizers of the euthanasia program Aktion T4; this Nazi initiative resulted in the systematic murder of 275,000 to 300,000 disabled people. He was sentenced to death and hanged on 2 June 1948.
Holly Black is an American writer and editor best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Her most recent work is the New York Times bestselling young adult Folk of the Air series. She is also well known for The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children's fantasy books she created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and her debut trilogy of young adult novels officially called the Modern Faerie Tales. Black has won an Eisner Award, a Lodestar Award, a Nebula Award, and a Newbery Honor.
Ludwik Fleck was a Polish Jewish and Israeli physician and biologist who did important work in epidemic typhus in Lwów, Poland, with Rudolf Weigl and in the 1930s developed the concepts of the "Denkstil" and the "Denkkollektiv".
Paul Allan Offit is an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, former chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases (1992–2014), and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Steven Paul Novella is an American clinical neurologist and associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Novella is best known for his involvement in the skeptical movement as a host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and as the president of the New England Skeptical Society. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).
Nicholas Michael Landon Wade is a British author and journalist. He is the author of numerous books, and has served as staff writer and editor for Nature, Science, and the science section of The New York Times.
Politico, known originally as The Politico, is a Washington metropolitan area, U.S., based politics focused digital newspaper company. Founded by American banker and media executive Robert Allbritton in 2007, it covers politics and policy in the United States and internationally, with publications dedicated to politics in the U.S., European Union, United Kingdom and Canada, among others. Primarily providing distributed news, analysis and opinion online, it also produces printed newspapers, radio, and podcasts. Its coverage focuses on topics such as the federal government, lobbying and the media.
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides immunity to an infectious disease.
Alexander Zaitchik is an American freelance journalist who writes on politics, media, and the environment. He has written for The Nation, The New Republic, the Intercept, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the Baffler, the International Herald Tribune, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Believer, among others. He was a staff writer and editor at the New York Press, the eXile in Moscow, and was the founding editor at the Prague Pill, an alternative newspaper in the Czech Republic.
Jonas Edward Salk was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
Fantastic Four is the name of several comic book titles featuring the team the Fantastic Four and published by Marvel Comics, beginning with the original Fantastic Four comic book series which debuted in 1961.
A louse-feeder was a job in interwar and Nazi-occupied Poland, at the Lviv Institute for Study of Typhus and Virology and the associated Institute in Kraków, Poland. Louse-feeders were human sources of blood for lice infected with typhus, which were then used to research possible vaccines against the disease.
Hurair Vasken Aposhian was a Ph.D. toxicologist and an emeritus professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Arizona, a post he held beginning in 1975. He is also a former professor of pharmacology at the medical school at said university. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry, at Brown University, 1948. He received a master's degree and a PhD in physiological chemistry at the University of Rochester, where he published some scientific studies about the synthesis of isoalloxazine ring-containing compounds. He did a postdoctoral with Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has done sabbatical scholar-in-residence at MIT and at the University of California at San Diego. He is best known for his pioneering work on Succimer and Unithiol in the treatment of arsenic, mercury, lead and other heavy metals leading to FDA approval of succimer in childhood lead poisoning at levels over 40 ug/dl. Previous posts he had held include at Vanderbilt, Tufts University, and the University of Maryland. His views about mercury in vaccines and in dental amalgams go against the consensus of the medical community and are controversial.
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver is a 2007 book by freelance writer Arthur Allen. The book describes the history of vaccination, beginning in 1796 when the smallpox vaccine was pioneered by Edward Jenner, and including mandatory vaccination policies during World War II in the United States military. It ends with a discussion of the vaccine-autism controversy.
The Lancet MMR autism fraud centered on the publication in February 1998 of a fraudulent research paper titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" in The Lancet. The paper, authored by now discredited and deregistered Andrew Wakefield, and twelve coauthors, falsely claimed causative links between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and colitis and between colitis and autism. The fraud was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield being struck off the UK medical register three months later. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to US$43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for a non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival vaccine at the time, and he had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers.
Marian Ciepielowski was a Polish physician and scientist. A survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, he is best known for his activity as a saboteur within the camp's vaccine production unit. Ciepielowski's actions resulted in useful vaccines being distributed to camp inmates, while inactive and useless "vaccines" were sent to Nazi soldiers. After the war he emigrated to the United States.