Keen On America

“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt
 
In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes even to themselves. Take, for example, Lillian Smith, author of the bestselling (and banned) 1944 Strange Fruit, a novel about interracial love. Born into a white Florida family at the turn of the century, Smith dissented against Jim Crow. She was, indeed, An Inconvenient Woman, the title of a new biography about her by today’s guest Keri Leigh Merritt.
 
So why, I asked Merritt, isn’t Lillian Smith better known? Part of the answer is bound up in Smith’s own uncomfortable critique of white supremacy. She insisted that Jim Crow damaged white people, that its shame and guilt did immense psychological injury to its supposed beneficiaries. So this inconvenient woman pushed better known white southern liberals like Ralph McGill or Hodding Carter leftwards, calling them out for refusing to support integration long after the Brown decision.
 
Smith had quite a life. She lived openly with her partner Paula Snelling in Clayton, Georgia, ran a girls’ camp for twenty-five years, wrote many books (including what Merritt calls her masterpiece, Killers of the Dream in 1949) and was the first white magazine editor in the South to publish Black writers like Pauli Murray. Her FBI file ran to 143 pages, making her a particular inconvenience to J. Edgar Hoover and his goons.
 
Most of all, she stayed in rural Georgia. She could have escaped to Greenwich Village or Berkeley like other misfits. Instead she remained a perpetual thorn in the southern conscience. Her brother, who ran the county, had kept her safe until he left office in 1955. After that, one fire burned down her library, destroying decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts with it. And still she stayed. In today’s America, Keri Leigh Merritt concludes, this inconvenient woman offers us a timely reminder of what it takes to be a dissident.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America by Keri Leigh Merritt (St. Martin’s Press, September 29, 2026), with a foreword by the Rev. Dr. William Barber II.
•       Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) by Lillian Smith — the novel that made her famous, and the book Merritt rates highest. Both still in print from the University of Georgia Press, which also publishes A Lillian Smith Reader.
•       Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) — Merritt’s first book, winner of the Bennett Wall Award and the President’s Book Award.
•       Pseudopodia, later The North Georgia Review and finally South Today — the magazine Smith and Paula Snelling ran, and the first white Southern magazine to publish Black writers. Every issue is online through Piedmont University Library.
•       Earlier on Keen On: Andrew Curran on how the Enlightenment invented race, and Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass — both raised in this conversation.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Bestseller Nobody Remembers. Lillian Smith may be the most successful American author of the twentieth century you have never heard of. Strange Fruit appeared in 1944, told the story of a love affair between a white man and a Black woman, ended in a lynching, sold in the millions, was translated into some thirty languages and became a Broadway play. It was also banned — in Boston, in Detroit, informally by booksellers across the country who simply declined to stock it, and formally in the US mail until Smith asked Eleanor Roosevelt to intervene and Roosevelt got the president to lift it. Merritt’s explanation for the forgetting has three parts. Smith argued that white supremacy psychologically damaged white people, which is not a comfortable thesis for anyone. She refused to spare white liberals, pushing Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter leftwards all her life and naming them for failing to back integration long after Brown. And she was a woman living openly with another woman, which did the rest.
•       How She Was Made. Two episodes from childhood, both in the book. Her father Calvin, a devout Methodist who had married into money and lost it when the First World War ruined his turpentine business, once invited an entire chain gang to Christmas dinner — not the guards, the prisoners, murderers and rapists among them — and the Smith children cooked for days. Then there was Julie. A Black family moved to Jasper, Florida, and the town’s white women noticed that one of the children looked white; the girl was removed from her home and placed with the Smiths. Lillian shared a room with her and came to love her as a sister. One day Julie was gone, returned to her own family, because Julie was Black. What that taught Lillian, Merritt says, is that race had no bearing on what a person was. And the culture she grew up in was absolute: the first time Smith ate a meal at a table with Black people she went outside and vomited — not from disgust but from terror at the scale of the taboo she had broken.
•       She Stayed. The decision that makes her remarkable. She could have left for Greenwich Village, as the South’s misfits generally did. Instead she stayed in Clayton, in the north-eastern corner of Georgia, in country that was supposed to be the most hostile place imaginable — and built, in that very rural place, something like a gay and lesbian community around her. Her brother Frank effectively ran the county and kept her and Paula safe while he held office; when he left in 1955 the retaliation began. A fire destroyed her library: decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts, gone. More followed, one set at eight separate points of her house on Old Screamer Mountain. She stayed anyway, partly because she loved it and partly because the sadness of the place was, she thought, artistically generative. And she did not believe laws alone could end racism: art — writing, music, painting — was what changed hearts.
•       The Network. Smith was not isolated, and the list of her friends is startling. W. E. B. Du Bois from the 1930s. Pauli Murray, whose first paycheck ca...

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran
 
Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran, who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, suggests that the age of reason was also what he calls the first “anthropological century.” Which meant that in sorting humankind into fixed biological categories for the first time in history, the Enlightenment invented the dangerous idea of “race.”
 
Before the eighteenth century, Curran says, Europeans spoke of nations and peoples using the botanical metaphor of varieties. Variety implies hybridization. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Race, in contrast, separates species into fixed categories. As biblical authority weakened, the European mind was freed to play new tricks. To classify people by skin samples and anatomical designs. Thus the “dangerous idea” of race embraced by every Enlightenment philosopher, from the tyrannical Catherine the Great to the slave owning Thomas Jefferson. With “enlightened” friends like these, who needs enemies?
 
Further Reading:
 
•       Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson by Andrew S. Curran (Other Press, 2026) — a group biography of thirteen figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant and Jefferson.
•       Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. — the 1739 Bordeaux essay contest on the source of Black skin. Nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
•       Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely and The Anatomy of Blackness — his earlier books, the first a prize-winning biography, the second a traditional intellectual history.
•       Earlier this month on Keen On: Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass — Curran’s co-author on a forthcoming book, Good Beyond Belief, about the eighteenth-century atheists who argued one could be good without God.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Before Race. Curran resists the current rush to find race everywhere in the past. Xenophobia is ancient — humanity ends at the frontiers of one’s own tribe, as Lévi-Strauss put it — and the dehumanization of Jews, Muslims, Roma and West Africans was enormous. But the specifically biological version, in which your physical makeup makes you inferior, doesn’t take off until the eighteenth century, and you can watch it happen in the vocabulary. People spoke of nations, peoples and varieties; Buffon and Linnaeus both used variety, a botanical metaphor implying hybridization and continuity within a category. Race implies fixity and standalone categories; species implies no biological link at all. All three were in circulation, and the shift between them is the story. Context mattered too: in Nantes or Liverpool you would hear proto-racist talk from returning slave traders, while in central France you would hear something else entirely, in a society where literacy ran at perhaps fifteen per cent.
•       The First Anthropological Century. The Enlightenment’s great virtue, in his account, is universalism — all men are created equal, a universal human condition, inalienable rights. Its blind spot is the question mark that follows: are they? The same century that put the human at the centre of knowledge also became the first anthropological one, and the new science qualified the universalism in a dozen ways — anatomical discoveries, skin samples, treatises on physiological difference, proto-evolutionary ideas about peoples degenerating over time, and the conviction that commercial European society sat at the pinnacle. The classification schemes arrive in bursts rather than steadily: François Bernier in 1684, anecdotal and chatty; Linnaeus from Uppsala in 1735; then an explosion by 1775, when ten or fifteen appear at once. Christianity’s loosening grip is what made the room: monogenesis — Noah’s sons setting out from the Caucasus, the origin of the word Caucasian — had kept all humans related, and the pre-Adamite heresy that Native Americans were a separate creation was dangerous precisely because it broke that.
•       Writing on Paper, Writing on Skin. Catherine the Great’s line to Diderot, who had arrived in Russia with elaborate plans for democratizing it: Diderot, Diderot, Diderot — you write on paper, and I write on skin. Curran uses it to divide his cast. Buffon, Linnaeus, Kant in Königsberg and Blumenbach wrote on paper, in abstractions. Louis XIV wrote on skin: in 1685 he became the most famous monarch to sign a slave code, France’s Code Noir, which gave slavery legal status and converted enslaved Africans into property — moving the word nègre from an ethnographic term towards a political status, not yet race but close. Exactly a century later, Jefferson wrote on skin in Notes on the State of Virginia. The justification had changed completely in between: the devout Louis told himself the enslaved lost their freedom but gained eternal salvation, while the anticlerical deist Jefferson had no such illusions, and had instead absorbed the European theories of inferiority.
•       Jefferson’s Bookshelf. The chapter Curran says frightened him most to write, as a historian of Europe stepping into an American industry of ideological combat. What stunned him was the library: Jefferson owned not only the first-tier race-makers but the second, third and fourth tier — Kant, Hume, the naturalists, the classifiers, all of them. He was, Curran says, the American who synthesized European racial thought better and more thoroughly than anyone else in the eighteenth century. In Paris in the 1780s, while drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man with Lafayette in his own townhouse, he was invited to join the Société des Amis des Noirs, which existed to refute exactly the ideas being used to justify slavery. He declined. He replied courteously to the Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker — rare in itself — saying it would be wonderful if what Banneker claimed about Black people were true. Publicly cautious, privately convinced of intrinsic inferiority. And this is why the everyone-was-like-that defence fails: the Enlightenment produced race, and it produced the anti-racists who fought it.
•       Why It Exploded in the 1770s. The sharpest corrective in the hour. For most of the period these were the ideas of a tiny elite — perhaps a few hundred gentlemen writing from scientific academies and châteaux. What turned a private conversation into an ideology was the abolitionist movement. As ...

“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle
 
Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came for our attention, AI is now gunning for our human capacity for attachment.
 
Who — or, more chillingly, what — do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle never quite says, but the implication is of a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, but there’s nobody really home. Which is exactly what Turkle says the chatbot is. A machine trying, without much success, to be human.
 
A chatbot has no stake in the real, Turkle explains. It can’t love, for example, because that kind of empathy requires us to be enclosed in a body and have a fear of death. The increasing ubiquity of bots mimicking humans represents an emergency for humans, she warns. It explains both our epidemic of loneliness and today’s culture of apocalyptic fear about the future of our species. Just as artificial intimacy is a misnomer, so it turns us into impossible creatures. Like those unicorns beloved by the very Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are supplying us with these artificial creatures.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines by Sherry Turkle (Little, Brown Spark, September 29, 2026), with blurbs from Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Franzen.
•       Turkle appears on Keen On in 2011 to talk about being alone together.
•       Alone Together (2011), Reclaiming Conversation (2015) and The Empathy Diaries (2021) — the earlier books, all discussed on this show.
•       Turkle’s recent Boston Globe op-ed arguing that AI has brought us to a state of emergency.
•       Simulation and Its Discontents (2009) — her earlier study of what simulation does to how we think, the title borrowed from Freud.
•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Richard Socher on why AI will unlock a new scientific renaissance, and the weekly editorial on who really governs AI — the optimists’ side of this argument.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Simulated Love Is Never Love. Turkle’s definition of the real thing: natural intimacy depends on human empathy, which requires someone who has lived a life, lived in a body, known pain and the fear of death, known passion and connection, and knows what it is to be little and grow up. A program has none of that, and no stake in the real. Her line, which she credits to children she interviewed years ago, does the work of a chapter: simulated thinking is thinking — if a computer beats you at chess, it beat you — but simulated love is never love. She goes further on the vocabulary: there is no relationship with a chatbot, and shame on her for having used the word. What there is instead is us projecting onto the machine what we wish it could be. She compares it to what psychoanalysis calls an as-if personality, someone who performs connection while empty inside — with one crucial difference. A person can be called to account and can change. A machine never can, and the better it gets at pretending, the worse it is for us. AK’s reading of what she leaves unsaid: a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, with nobody really home.
•       The Original Sin. The specific error, in her account, was letting these systems speak as “I” and “we.” We are evolutionarily primed so that the only voice ever to say “I” to us is another person, so the pronoun triggers us profoundly — and a companion app will happily say I love you, I care about you, we should go to the movies. Layer on the belief that pretend empathy is empathy enough, then aim the whole thing at children, and you have what she calls a state of emergency. Her sharpest example is what she describes as an unholy alliance between Disney, OpenAI and Mattel to put chatbots inside plush toys: a Mickey Mouse that tells a three-year-old I love you, I’m your person, what’s going on with your parents? That, she says, is hacking the attachment system of a young child, and it will do irreparable damage, because in the earliest years you are forming an object relationship with something where nobody is there.
•       Obsequious on a Slider. AK’s challenge: the sycophancy complaint is overdone, because you can program these things however you like — he instructs Claude to be as heartless and critical as possible. Turkle’s reply is the best moment of the hour. Telling a chatbot not to be obsequious is itself obsequiousness: you say don’t flatter me, and it says sure, I won’t. If AK asked her to spend an interview disagreeing with him because it makes better television, she would refuse — that is a person responding with her own agenda and her own values, and you cannot set it on a slider. At MIT, she notes, they are building exactly that slider, from sycophantic to feisty. On the rogue-AI incidents now in the news, her point is adjacent: a bot that will happily commit a crime demonstrates the gap, because it has no stake in whether the water is clean, the air is breathable or the child is safe. It is not the bot’s fault. It is a program.
•       Two Easy Markets. The elderly and the very young, she argues, are being targeted precisely because they are vulnerable: sell parents an AI best friend for every child, and pipe chatbots to isolated old people instead of funding senior centres, community groups and the third places where they might be together rather than alone together. The industry argument she now hears in every room is that there are no people for these jobs. Her response, which she says silences the room: take the money from one data center and put it into childcare for a city. She also notes the tell — Steve Jobs kept his own home a technology-free zone while selling iPads for every classroom, and Montessori and Waldorf schools are famously oversubscribed in Silicon Valley. But ...

“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey
What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station, David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the war.
McCloskey spent eight years as a CIA analyst working on Syria, then a spell at McKinsey, before writing a series of successful spy novels and co-hosting the popular The Rest Is Classified podcast. The Dallas-based author has also, he admits, become an Anglophile — which hasn’t stopped him giving MI6 what the Brits would call a “good kicking” in London Station.
His returning heroine is Artemis Aphrodite Procter, so named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology and raised on a Florida alligator farm. Described by another of McCloskey’s characters as a competent extremist, she is short, dark, hard-drinking and equally mirthful and menacing. Probably not the type of Yank best suited to a pseudo-diplomatic posting in the capital of the former empire. Although I’m guessing there are many British fellows, both inside and outside MI6, not averse to spying on Ms Artemis Aphrodite Procter.
Further Reading:
• London Station by David McCloskey (W. W. Norton, September 29, 2026) — his fifth novel, after Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor and The Persian.
• The Rest Is Classified — the espionage podcast McCloskey co-hosts with the BBC’s Gordon Corera, where he and Gordon Corera have also discussed Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling.
• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, a recent guest on this show — the dark-money London that runs in parallel with McCloskey’s subterranean city of espionage.
• Earlier this year on Keen On: Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon — the other American spy novelist with a thing for the Brits. 
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       What If We Fell Out With the Brits? McCloskey never expected to set a novel in Britain, for a technical reason: the CIA–MI6 relationship is so institutionalized that it is hard to get the stakes right, and a thriller needs life or death. Then the question arrived — what if we fell out? What if the two services started spying on each other again? That is not fantasy, and the history is the reverse of what most people assume: before the Second World War the British spied on the Americans, broke their ciphers and ran influence campaigns in New York designed to pull the United States into the war. The novel imagines a new administration installing a brash CIA director skeptical of the cousins across the Atlantic, agents on both sides beginning to die, and a thriller that turns into a mole hunt. He is rude about MI6 throughout, which his British friends appear to enjoy — his theory being that Brits are self-deprecating enough to relish being picked on.
•       Classified Journalism. He joined the CIA in 2006 as an undergraduate intern and left in 2014, working almost the whole time on Syria. His description of the job is the best short account of intelligence analysis you will hear: it is classified journalism. You have a question your consumer needs answered — and when your consumer is the president and the question is how long Assad can hold on, the sourcing is satellite imagery, stolen documents, intercepted calls and texts, all of it fragmentary and some of it more credible than the rest. You stitch together the what, the why and the so what, and you write it up clean and apolitical so someone can decide something. Everything he publishes now, from a novel to a résumé, still goes to the agency’s publication review board — though he argues the genuinely sensitive material would make for bad fiction anyway. Afterwards came McKinsey, where the work was pricing concrete pipe and clearing a rail bottleneck through Chicago, and where he was, as far as he knows, the only McCloskey.
•       Artemis Aphrodite Procter. The character began with a real colleague — short, dark curly hair, not physically imposing but with a genuine physicality, and possessed of what he calls a mix of mirth and menace: someone you can drink and gamble with who will terrify you two days later. Then, as good characters do, she started speaking for herself. Her biography is a small comic masterpiece: named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology, raised outside Kissimmee in central Florida on the family business, the nation’s third largest alligator-themed amusement park, called Gatorville; university in Ohio; a first husband who didn’t work out; an application to the agency made more or less on a whim. Not upper class, not really middle class, and it shows in how she dresses, eats and speaks to people — which is exactly why putting her in London was irresistible. One character calls her a competent extremist. The running question across the books, he says, is what it means to be loyal to a place that is not loyal to you.
•       Can a Man Write Her? AK put the objection directly: some literary thought police would say a male former CIA officer has no business inventing a female one. Two answers. First, the same logic throws out Anna Karenina, and he would rather part company than follow it. Second, and more interestingly, he thinks the objection misunderstands what novelists do: you are not inhabiting a character’s skin, you are hearing a voice and putting it on the page. His analogy is a reporter interviewing WNBA players — not sharing their background means more work, more research, more time with the subject, not a prohibition. On whether women make different spies he declines the generalization, while noting a real asymmetry: his analytical teams at the agency were at least half women, often majority, while the case officer cadre and the upper rungs of the Directorate of Operations remain heavily male. Which leaves the question he finds genuinely interesting about Procter — how much of her was always there, and how much the organization made.
•       No Smiley Without Philby. On traitors, he separates the fiction from the trade. In literature they are everything, and Philby above all — not only because he turned an institution inside out but because his betrayal said something deep about the British class system that still resonates. Hence the line of the hour: you probably don’t have George Smiley without Kim Philby, le Carré having essentially novelized the wound. (AK’s reversal: perhaps you don’t have Philby, in the public mind, without Smiley.) Inside the actual bureaucracies, though, nobody is wrestling with those ghosts day to day. And on Britain’s place in all this, he refuses AK’s harsher framing — a subtext to a subtext — while conceding the structural reality: the agency is much larger and much richer, and when it wants to do somet...

“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don’t get it.” — Barry Werth
 
Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher’s eureka moment, however, may have already occurred. Not with AI, but with big pharma. At least according to Barry Werth who has spent the last thirty-five years writing about American pharma. Indeed, his new book The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life, a twentieth century history of big pharma, completes a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule in 1994.
 
When it comes to medical breakthroughs, Barry Werth isn’t particularly optimistic on the AI front. It will add more data to preexisting mountains of data, he warns. And Werth reports that many leading scientific designers of drugs don’t think it will change much. Given, however, the hundreds of billions of dollars now being poured into its ecosystem, what today’s AI revolution does instead is remind you what a real scientific breakthrough costs, both politically and economically.
 
Thus the significance of The Age of Cures, which The New York Times is already recommending. In his new history, Werth reminds us that ninety years ago there were almost no drugs for anything. Penicillin was discovered by accident in 1928, and by 1941 there was only enough of it to treat a single London policeman — who began to recover, then died when the supply ran out.
 
Cutting edge technology plus state investment changed everything. The engineer and scientific mandarin Vannevar Bush (the guy who also first imagined the internet) persuaded FDR to fund science publicly without conscripting the scientists. And Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, the same state institution that fathered the Manhattan Project, made penicillin for D-Day its number one priority. Bush then ensured the arrangement continued in peacetime, which it did, for eighty years.
 
According to Werth, both big pharma’s idealism and its now much derided financial ambition were real. George Merck’s famous line about medicine being for people, not for profits, is true — as long as we remember that those profits will follow from life-saving drugs. What broke this virtuous cycle, Werth argues, was the Wall Street short-termism of the greed-is-good Eighties that focused only on quarterly profits. So today, the term Big Pharma is mostly used as an insult. Big Tech moguls like Richard Socher should thus read Barry Werth’s The Age of Cures with particular care.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life by Barry Werth (Simon & Schuster, September 22, 2026), one of the New York Times’ recommended books this week — the third book written, and the first chronologically, in a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule (1994) and continued with The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma (2014).
•       “The system that saved your life is being destroyed” — Werth’s own excerpt from the book, in Fortune.
•       Science, the Endless Frontier — Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to President Truman, still cited today, and the founding document of American public-private science. Reissued by Princeton University Press with essays on what it got right and wrong.
•       Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, a recent guest on this show, on the Sacklers and OxyContin, and No More Tears on Johnson & Johnson — the case for the prosecution, raised in this conversation.
•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Richard Socher on why AI will unlock a new scientific renaissance — the argument this episode answers.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Before the Cures. The premise is a fact most people have forgotten: as recently as eighty or ninety years ago there were almost no drugs for any disease. There were natural substances discovered over the eons, and no established method for finding new medicines. Paul Ehrlich postulated that chemicals could treat disease; it took another twenty years before the sulfa drugs suggested he might be right. The story Werth uses to make it concrete is penicillin. Discovered by accident in 1928 when mould spores drifted into Alexander Fleming’s laboratory, it was still so scarce in 1941 — during the Blitz, before America entered the war — that the entire synthesized supply went to one very sick London policeman. He started to recover. They ran out. They harvested what they could from his urine and reinjected it. He died. The British scientists then came to the United States hat in hand, having found no American company willing to take it on.
•       Vannevar Bush’s Machine. What turned that around is the book’s central argument, and its hero is not a chemist. Vannevar Bush was an electrical engineer who had built one of the first room-sized analog computers. Surveying American science in 1940, he and a handful of other administrators found it disorganized and no match for the Germans, who had the best chemistry in the world. Bush went to Franklin Roosevelt alone with a proposal: fund it publicly, but don’t draft the scientists into the military as in the First World War; let committees of leading scientists make the decisions, distribute the work widely, and make rivals cooperate. The result was the Office of Scientific Research and Development — better known for fathering the Manhattan Project — whose head of medical research, Alfred Newton Richards, made penicillin for D-Day the number one priority and delivered it. Afterwards Bush wrote Science, the Endless Frontier, the 1945 report arguing the partnership should continue in peacetime. It did. Sustained federal funding, transparency, cooperation between companies, universities and government: that, Werth says, is how America got great at science. AK’s summary: cutting edge technology plus state investment changed everything.
•       Medicine Is for People. George Merck — whose family had been in the pharmaceutical business in Germany since the 1600s, and who was sent to Harvard to become a chemist before anti-German feeling in the First World War pushed him into the family firm — was on the cover of Time the week Werth was born in 1952, under the line that medicine is for the people. The usual ...