Anyone who has ever taken medication - and who hasn't - will be familiar with the phrase "ask your doctor or pharmacist about the risks and side effects", and so you will know that a main side effect can also have a side effect. Generally speaking, it can be said that achievements have a downside, specifically the car's greenhouse gas emissions.
But where danger grows, so does salvation, as a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin puts it, and the American historian Jennet Conant has now shown that the poet is right and that salvation can only come when the danger has passed. Jennet Conant has written a book entitled "The Great Secret", which begins with an attack by German troops on the Italian city of Bari in December 1943, in which mustard gas was used and over 1,000 soldiers and civilians lost their lives. An American doctor named Stewart Alexander was caring for the wounded as a colonel at the time and noticed that some people did not show symptoms until days after the bombing. His examinations led to the conclusion that they had not been directly affected by the attackers' poison gas, but that on the contrary their own warfare agents, which had been kept secret and hidden on a ship of their own that had been hit in the air raid, were having a pathological effect. One of the chemicals hidden there was called nitrogen mustard, and closer examination showed that the late damage caused by contact with this substance was due to a reduction in the number of white blood cells in the sufferers. When the war was over, Dr. C.P. Dusty, who had previously served as Colonel Alexander's military superior and now worked as a physician in a cancer research institute, recalled the observations from Bari, and the idea of treating blood cancer with nitrogen mustard occurred to him. Dusty knew that neoplasms and leukemia were associated with an increased number of white blood cells, and why not try to reduce them by using the formerly hidden and secret substance? No sooner said than done - and so mankind has a drug that can be used as a chemotherapeutic agent to fight cancer. From war to the clinic, from death to life.
