Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American's Science Talk, hosted on August 31, 2015. I'm Steve Mirsky. This past week, Scientific American celebrated the 170th anniversary of our first issue, so we had a little party. More on that in about eight minutes. First, Jimmy Carter has been in the news of late due to his announcement that he's fighting metastatic cancer. Back in January the former president and 2002 Nobel Peace laureate spoke to Scientific American editor in chief, Mariette DiChristina, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
[Beginning of Interview]
Mariette DiChristina: Thank you very much, President Carter, for being with us today. The first thing is, today you've just made some announcements about the Carter Center's work in Guinea Worm and the progress since you began working on that in 1986. Can you speak to that for just a minute – how that's going and what remains to be done?
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Jimmy Carter: We began the eradication of Guinea Worm from the face of the earth in 1986. We found the disease in 20 countries – three in Asia and the rest of them in sub-Saharan Africa. When we began to complete our survey, we had been in 23,500 villages and we food three and a half million cases of Guinea Worm then. Last year, we had 126 cases, so now we know every person on earth that has Guinea Worm and we monitor them very closely. We expect Guinea Worm to be the second disease in the history of the world to be completely eradicated from the face of the earth. We're very pleased with what's going on and it's still a big challenge because those last 126 cases, for some reason they haven't been eradicated yet. They are quite intransigent and cost a lot of money and effort to get those last cases done.
Guinea Worm is a horrible disease. It's an ancient disease. It was known in the bible as the fiery serpent. We have been very pleased so far at what the people themselves have done who have gone into individual villages, told them what causes that disease – drinking bad water with Guinea Worm eggs in it – and what they can do about it, which is primarily to use filter cloths and so forth to take the eggs out of the water before they drink it.
DiChristina: I know it's a challenge to get to the end with that. That reminds me of another very challenging area that I'd like to ask you about, which is mental health care and the Carter Center's efforts in that area. What are some of the next steps we can take to try to address mental health concerns globally as well?
Carter: I would say that my wife, Rosalynn, is the number one expert on mental health and a world leader on it. She has a large group of women who help her. Some of them are queens, some of them are first ladies, some of them are incumbent presidents of countries. Rosalynn has also seen that one of the key problems here is the misinterpretation or misrepresentation of mental health by the news media.
A number of years ago, Rosalynn began to train reporters for magazines, newspapers, television, and radio on how to report accurately on what is mental health, how you can bring about mental health from sick people, and what needs to be done about it. She not only does that in this country, but also in other countries like South Africa, and Mexico, and Columbia – all over the world. She brings in reporters and teaches them, and then they go back and write accurate things about mental health.
She's also started a program, for instance, in Liberia of training mental health nurses. Liberia has been through 16 years of civil war and they have a lot of PTSD and so forth. Mental health problems derive from the long civil wars, so Rosalynn decided since they only had one psychiatrist in Liberia, to train 144 psychiatric nurses. Those nurses have not completed that training. At this moment, they're helping with Ebola, but when the Ebola crisis goes down they will go back to concentrating on mental health. Those are the kinds of things you can do – train people that are expert in it, let reporters give an accurate picture of what mental health is, and convince people that it's a disease of the brain in most cases. With successful treatment and absence of stigma, the people that have mental health can be cured and lead normal lives.
DiChristina: This reminds me also - and speaking of Rosalynn in particular reminds me of this. You had recently announced a dedication – you've always had a focus on this, but a dedication in particular to women's health issues and fostering those at this point, and what we can do to do that. Why that and why now?
Carter: The worst human rights abuse on earth that's not addressed is the abuse of women and girls. Quite often, this takes the case of health care. For instance, in Egypt is where female circumcision is a crime, about 90 percent of all the females living in Egypt at this moment have been sexually mutilated at an early age. In some countries, it's 97 or 98 percent of all the women have. Child brides is another serious problem. Children eight, or nine, or ten years old being sold into permanent slavery to oppressive uncaring husbands. This is another serious problem.
When a country has people that are very poor and they can't afford to give good food or healthcare to a large number of children, the girls are the last ones that get the food, and care, and the opportunity for education or healthcare. Almost everywhere in the world where there is discrimination, the first people who suffer from discrimination are the little girls. That carries on throughout their life as a female.
DiChristina: It's interesting to me. I'm sort of reflecting as you're talking about some of the very intractable problems that you have been addressing through the Carter Center, whether it's horrible diseases like Guinea Worm, or river blindness, or mental health issues where people have often suffered from the stigma associated, and now women's health. One of the things that impresses me about addressing those intractable issues is your focus on measurable outcomes and evidence-based thinking. Are there any lessons you'd like to share with the audience about how we can foster that kind of thinking for success?
Carter: It's especially important to me. I'm an engineer. I did my graduate work in nuclear physics. When we began the Carter Center, I wanted to quantify everything so I can tell you exactly how many people have Guinea Worm. I can tell you the names and addresses of everybody that has Guinea Worm in the world. I know exactly how many people we'll treat this year for river blindness – 24 million, as a matter of fact. More than the people that live in New York State. I know exactly how many remaining cases there are of trachoma in the world. I know exactly how many latrines we've built to do away with the flies that transmit the disease.
We quantify the problems still remaining and the successes we've had. This is very helpful in a practical way with me because when people give us money at the Carter Center to do these things, we can go back a year later and say, "This is what has resulted from your contribution. We've improved the situation in these particular countries, so why don't you give us a little bit more money?" It's a selfish thing to do, but also I think it makes it a kind of an extra stimulus for our health workers, our volunteers, the people that own our payroll temporarily, and our permanent doctors and so forth that take care of these problems. They know that they have to prove to me when they say we're making real progress against trachoma or lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis or things like that, that they could actually show me by statistics – by proof – that they've made this progress that they claim.
DiChristina: I like the idea of proving the benefit, and if people wanted to know more, they can go to cartercenter.org, right?
Carter: Exactly. Yeah. And every one of the diseases I've mentioned – let's look at how many bed nets we put up to prevent malaria and lymphatic filariasis. They can go on the Carter website and see how many bed nets we've helped to build last year.
DiChristina: Thanks so much, President Carter, for your time. I really appreciate it. I look forward to seeing continuing progress that we'll watch for proof of in the future.
[End of Interview]
Mirsky: The first issue of Scientific American was published by Rufus Porter on August 28, 1845, which means we just had our 170th birthday. We had a little party at our office, which featured artifacts from our history. One of our guests was Steven Lomazow. He's a neurologist who happens to have put together one of the most incredible magazine collections on the planet. As an MD, he has a particular fondness for science magazines. He brought some of his best stuff to our gathering.
[Beginning of Interview]
Mirsky: Tell us what we have here and how you came to possess it all?
Lomazow: What I brought with me is basically a compendium of early American science periodicals. The most important and first issues of all the major magazines that came out from the beginning to probably the early part of the 20th century. I like to have the first and most important issue of every magazine ever published, and clearly, Scientific American is among them. I brought with me today a first volume from 1845 and all the original Rufus Porter issues, plus the first issue in original wrappers of the supplement issue in 1876.
Mirsky: What were the supplements?
Lomazow: Supplements were put out as an additional publication at the time for the centennial. It was supposedly only going to be for a year or two, but there were two publications of equivalent size until the 20s, when this went out and merged into the main Scientific American.
And then I brought along the first issue of Popular Science monthly.
Mirsky: And this is from 1872.
Lomazow: Here is the first American scientific journal ever published, the American Journal of Science, edited by Benjamin Silliman who was a geologist from Yale. You can still sit in Silliman Hall. This is still being published.
Mirsky: What's the date?
Lomazow: 1818. And this is in the original wrapper. This is some of the things I brought. This is a copy of the Franklin Journal, which is one of the most important American scientific journals. And the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia which is still alive. This particular issue is very important because it's from 1839 and it has the first description of the daguerreotype process ever published in America.
There were two men who sort of co-invented photography – Daguerre in France and Fox Talbot in England. In fact, the first American mention of photography was an article by Fox Talbot in April or May of 1839, in a journal called The Coursair. Really interesting what they would do – we didn't have the Atlantic Cable at that time, so what they would do is they would send out a very fast packet boat from New York to meet the steamer that was coming over regularly. They met up and then the packet boat would speed back to bring the news as fast as possible to scoop everybody. One of the articles that they brought in on that day was Fox Talbot's article called "The Pencil of Nature" announcing the beginning of photography.
Mirsky: How fast was the fastest you could get information between the two continents?
Lomazow: Not very fast at all. As fast as the winds let you do it. Obviously until the Atlantic Cable we had nothing. I think it was 1845 was Cyrus Field and the Atlantic Cable. Until then, it was just get the fastest boat across the ocean. They figured out a system to get it here faster by sending a boat out – a fast boat as fast as it can go for the limited distance to meet the steamer. Maybe they met them in Newfoundland or something like that.
Obviously there's hundreds of periodicals published every year but this is just sort of a compendium of the major scientific ones. My home is filled with hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and thousands actually – 7,800 items on my database of every genre of American periodical from every era – about history, science. Anything about American popular culture was first done in a magazine.
Mirsky: For people who have never seen the original Scientific Americans, it's a broad sheet so it looks like the size of The New York Times today.
Lomazow: Exactly. And what's impressive about it is it's actually very high quality paper.
Mirsky: Which is why it looks really good after all these years.
Lomazow: It's not the kind of newsprint paper that's used today with high acid. That would crumble. Many, many 18th century periodicals are in very good condition because they used a much higher quality of paper than they do now.
Mirsky: The paper is still almost white, even.
Lomazow: Exactly, and first volume is very rare. These are all the issues that Rufus Porter edited himself. He soon sold the magazine. He maintained the editorship but he sold the ownership of the magazine.
Someone pointed out something very interesting to me. There's a month gap between the eighth and the ninth weekly issue because there was a fire in Porter's house and he couldn't put out the magazine for the month. So the ninth issue says, "Oka, we're back."
Mirsky: Didn't he have all the files saved in the cloud?
Lomazow: I was amazed when somebody pointed it out to me. Sure enough, there's a month gap between the eighth and the ninth issue.
Mirsky: Very interesting. We hope we don't have any more fires, but if we do, we will probably still publish that month.
Lomazow: I would imagine so.
Mirsky: This was great. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming and bringing all this fabulous stuff. Do you have a website where they can see images?
Lomazow: thegreatamericanmagazine.com. americanmagazinecollection.com. My blog is magazinehistory.blogspot.com. I have been writing about this for years. Lots of wonderful stuff on there.
[End of Interview]
Mirsky:That's it for this episode. Get your science news at our Web site, www.scientificamerican.com where you can also check out our September issue devoted to Albert Einstein and the 100th anniversary of general relativity. And follow us on Twitter where you'll get a tweet whenever a new item hits the Web site. Our Twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American Science Talk, I'm Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.
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