2023-06-30 00:00:22
I want and I must begin by thanking the double distinction that I am the object of today by being invested as a member of the oldest academy in Mexico, and for having been invited to speak not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of the group of foreign doctors with whom I share the same honor today. academic biographies of Cristine Woopen, Stephen L. Hauser, Charles Balch Mitchell y Sir Michael Gideon Marmot They are a recount of their exceptional work as doctors, researchers, teachers, and editors of scientific journals, who despite the problems they face today, since the appearance of the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”in 1665 they are still the most important medium for the socialization of scientific knowledge.
The founding of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, the Académie Montmor in Paris, and the Royal Society in London throughout the seventeenth century marks for many the birth of modern science. Those who created these institutions inherited the thinkers of the Illustration the certainty that scientific truth cannot depend on political or religious power. That is one of the objectives of peer evaluation, which makes the scientific apparatus a participatory system, but not a democratic one. Today medicine and biology face extraordinary opportunities, but also political pressures that demand firm responses from us. Contrary to what the hypocrisy of political correctness claims, the recognition of cultural diversity and the so-called ancestral knowledge cannot be used to weaken the historical and social value of science. As Tzvetan Todorov rightly says, quoting the Marquis de Condorcet, the mathematician, philosopher and politician of the Enlightenment who so mistrusted the authoritarian populism of Robespierre, “Public power does not have the right to say where the truth lies”.
The life sciences received from the Enlightenment two great philosophical legacies intimately linked to each other. One was the consolidation of the secular vision of the nature of life, and the other was the recognition of the historical nature of biological phenomena. The secular perspective of the living does not represent, as pretends the outdated simplicity of some Jacobins, an anti-religious attitude, but the certainty that we do not need to invoke mystical forces to explain the nature of life itself. On the other hand, the historical vision is represented by the evolutionary ideas of John Baptist de Lamarckone of the authors of the Encyclopedia, whom Charles Darwin considered to be his most important predecessor. The primary objective of the theory of evolution is not in the endless discussion regarding whether God exists or not, but in the study of the processes and mechanisms that explain the past and present diversity of the biosphere.
Antonio Lazcano was one of the honorary members who entered the National Academy of Medicine, for being a reference in the national and international medical field.
ANM
The two authors most mentioned by Charles Darwin in “The origin of species” they are Newton and Lamarck, but it is not easy to understand the absence of their paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin, one of the great figures of the Enlightenment. Erasmus had studied at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, one of the most advanced educational institutions in the UK. He was a doctor and a poet, but although he was one of the founders of the Society of Lunatics, he was not insane. The group met on dates when there were nights with a full moon, to prevent the carriages from going off the road and falling off the rails when they returned home. With his friends Eramus Darwin opposed slavery, supported the ideas of the French Revolutionpromoted scientific and technological development, supported the independence of the American colonies, promoted female education in theory and in fact, and as he wrote to Edward Jennerenvisioned a future in which children were baptized and vaccinated at the same time.
It was a happy time when scientific disciplines were not separated by impassable borders, and in medical offices and natural history cabinets there were herbariums, two-headed fetuses, clothed fleas, telescopes and microscopes alongside collections of minerals, meteorites , fossils and kidney stones. Erasmus Darwin was both a physician and a naturalist., and published poems regarding plants and their taxonomy. His book “Zoonomy or The Laws of Organic Life” was, at the same time, a call for the modernization of medicine and the promotion of the ideas of biological evolution. His transformist convictions They led him to redesign the family crest with a band with three scallops, the coquille Saint Jacques of the French, and he adopted “E conchis omnia” as his motto, to proclaim that everything comes from shells, everything evolves from molluscs, everything originated in the seas from invertebrates.
Grandson, son, nephew and brother of doctors, Charles Darwin was destined for the study of medicine and at the age of 16 he was sent to the University of Edinburgh. He was an irredeemable and absent-minded slacker who got bored in classes, and although he had the handwriting of a surgeon, he mightn’t handle his medical studies. As he noted years later in his autobiography, “I attended the operating room of the Edinburgh hospital twice, and I witnessed two operations that left me with a terrible memory, one on a child, but in both cases I had to run away before they were finished. The memory of both surgeries continued to haunt me for many years.”
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The family soon realized that the family tradition had been broken and that the young Darwin had no future as a doctor. “After staying for two school sessions in Edinburgh, my father noticed, or rather He found out thanks to my sisters that I was not attracted to the idea of being a doctor”, wrote Darwin many years later, “and proposed that I become a priest of the Anglican Church”. To direct him towards a priestly career, he was sent to Cambridge, but he too did not excel in theological studies. as he wrote Niles Elridge en “The Lancet”When Darwin left Edinburgh, he took with him not only the traumatic memory of the surgeries, but also the teachings of two teachers who marked him forever. One was Robert Grant, a physician, naturalist, and promoter of the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck and Grandfather Darwin, and the other was Dr. Robert Jameson, who he created at the Edinburgh Medical School. the best natural history museum that existed for a long time in the UK.
Those times are gone forever, but as evidenced by the covid 19 pandemic, the interaction between biology and medicine continually opens up new horizons that can help us limit the risks of reductionism. As evidenced by HIV-AIDS, Zika, influenza and dengue, epidemics caused by RNA viruses, a molecule older than DNA itself, are becoming more frequent. Because biological evolution is a multifactorial process, we cannot predict which viruses will emerge or which mutations will be fixed in a population, but the molecular specificity is not as stringent as we think, and For a pathogen, the differences that separate a bat from a human are not as great as one might think..
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This was well understood by Charles Darwin., who in 1871 published his book on the origin of man where he stated that “everyone knows that man is built on the same general type or model as other mammals. All the bones in his skeleton are comparable to the corresponding bones of a monkey, a bat, or a seal. The same can be said of its muscles, nerves, blood vessels and internal viscera… Man can acquire from lower animals, or communicate to them in turn, diseases such as rabies, smallpox, etc., fact that proves the great similarity of their fabricsboth in its composition and in its elemental structure, with much more evidence than the comparison made with the aid of the microscope, or the most meticulous chemical analysis”.
“The Descent of Man” is not Darwin’s best bookbut as James Moore and Adrian Desmond wrote some 15 years ago, even its most intransigent critics recognized that in its pages, in addition to the bold application of evolutionary processes and mechanisms to try to understand our species, they emphasized the meaning of altruism, solidarity, a sense of duty, compassion and commitment to the well-being of humans. And that, there is no doubt, are virtues that many of us recognize in the medical community.
*Admission speech as Honorary Member of the National Academy of Medicine.
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