Quotes from Paul A. Offit

Various preparations of aluminum salts have been used in vaccines since the late 1930s. So, the safety of aluminum in vaccines has been assessed for more than seventy years. Aluminum salts act as adjuvants, enhancing the immune response. Inclusion of aluminum salts in vaccines that otherwise wouldn't evoke a good immune response makes it possible to reduce the number of doses and the quantity of immunological components within each dose.

Grant argued that America needed to become America again. And that the only way this was going to happen was if we removed the weeds and allowed people of Grant's race to flourish. A decade later, when Madison Grant's book was translated into German, no one would embrace his notion of race purity more than a young soldier imprisoned in a fortress in Landsberg.

By 2009, almost a hundred million doses of the pneumococcal vaccine had been given to American children. As a consequence, the incidence of pneumococcal disease has decreased dramatically.37 Far fewer children now get meningitis, pneumonia, and bloodstream infections caused by pneumococcus.

In the early 1960s, when Maurice Hilleman wanted to make his vaccine, measles virus was killing eight million children in the world every year.

Recognizing a familiar accent, he asked Lamoreux where he was from. "Helena," said Lamoreux. "Miles City," replied Hilleman, extending his hand. "Take them all," said Lamoreux, smiling broadly. "One buck apiece.

Within five years of Röntgen's invention, X-rays were considered essential for clinical care. In 1900, at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, 1.3 percent of all patients were X-rayed; by 1925, it was 25 percent. In 2009, a poll conducted by the Science Museum in London named the discovery of X-rays as more important than the discoveries of penicillin, computers, motorized cars, the telegraph, and the DNA double helix.

Historian Bettyann Kevles describes a 1920 professional gathering of radiologists, where so many attendees were missing hands and fingers that when the chicken dinner was served no one could cut their meat.

There is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics or intellectual capacity or that there is any connection between the physical and mental characteristics of human beings.

Nurse Ratched,

At the start of the AIDS epidemic, American boys with hemophilia lived as long as those without the disease. By the end of the 1980s, among the ten thousand American males with severe hemophilia, nine thousand were infected with HIV. By 1994, more than 25 percent of the American hemophiliac population had died from AIDS. Most were children and adolescents.

Before anesthesia, surgeons removed bladder stones, drained ovarian cysts, and amputated legs, but little else; they were rewarded for their speed more than their skill. A surgeon named Robert Liston, in an attempt to best his own speed record for amputating a leg, accidentally cut off one of his patient's testicles and two of his assistant's fingers.

The legal aphorism is that when the law is on your side, argue the law; when the facts are on your side, argue the facts; when neither is on your side, attack the witness.)

Today, although the terms have changed, the concepts remain the same. Now the evils released from Pandora's box have more specific names like pests, vermin, bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, toxins, cancer, heart disease, and pain—all of which have inflicted suffering or limited lives.

Because the dietary supplement industry is essentially unregulated, only 170 (0.3 percent) of the 54,000 products on the market have documented safety tests.

Today, 80 percent of the world's opioid prescriptions are written in the United States, even though only 5 percent of the world's population lives there.

Nothing is more dangerous than science without poetry or technical progress without emotional content," wrote Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a German philosopher.

Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation, submitted the eighty-five-letter Cherokee alphabet, hoping that her language would still be spoken a hundred years from now.

I do not, of course, propose to neglect the sick, the feeble or the unfortunate," wrote Galton, "but I would exact an equivalent for the charitable assistance they receive by preventing the more faulty members of the flock from breeding." Galton argued that lunatics, criminals, and paupers should be placed in monasteries and convents "for the purpose of restricting their opportunities for producing low-class offspring." Breeding had become weeding.

OCTOBER 1910, the Eugenics Record Office opened for business. Its mission was clear: Determine which Americans were of inferior stock and prevent them from marrying or having children.

In part because of antibiotics, we live 30 years longer than we did a hundred years ago.

Also, if you're going to say that animal studies predict events in people, then we should stop eating chocolate, which can cause heart arrhythmias and occasionally death in dogs.

These small quantities of mercury aren't harmful. Only large quantities are harmful. If small quantities of mercury were harmful, we'd have to move to a different planet.

Unfortunately, we seem incapable of learning the most important lesson in toxicology: The dose makes the poison.

The concept of multivitamins was sold to Americans by an eager nutraceutical industry to generate profits. There was never any scientific data supporting their usage.