Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born healer and hotelier of mixed African and Scottish background, was unusually mobile for a women of any class or race and still more so for a woman of mixed-race background. She travelled to England, Central America, and the Continent, eventually settling in England where she published her travel memoir, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, in 1857.

Mary Seacole statue, St Thomas’s Hospital, London

Living in Panama during the height of Gold Rush fever, Seacole providing food, shelter, and skilled medical care to travellers from 1850 to 1853. She then defied convention–and Florence Nightingale–by setting up a “British hotel” near the front lines of the Crimean War (1853-56), where she fed and cared for soldiers. She received the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991 (110 years posthumously) and was voted the Greatest Black Briton in  2004.

Tillie Olsen, in full Tillie Lerner Goldfarb Olsen, née Tillie Lerner, (born January 14, 1912, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died January 1, 2007, Oakland, California), American writer and social activist known for her powerful fiction about the inner lives of the working poor, women, and minorities. Her interest in long-neglected women authors inspired the development of academic programs in women’s studies, especially at the university level in the United States.

During her lifetime Olsen gained considerable fame, particularly among scholars. The American Academy of Arts and Letters cited Olsen in 1975 for creating a freshly poetic form of fiction. Although she never finished high school, she held nine honorary doctorates. She won grants from the Ford (1959–61) and Guggenheim (1975) foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts (1967), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1983), as well as countless residencies at artists’ colonies.

Though deeply influenced by her parents’ socialist values, Tillie Lerner began to live independently of them. At the beginning of 1930 she joined the Young Communist League.

A writing fellowship at Stanford University in 1955–56 at last made her dream possible. She published three largely autobiographical stories and a novella that all distill big issues into seemingly simple domestic tales. The first story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” which examines a mother’s guilt, was reprinted in Best American Short Stories (1957).

Reid, Panthea. “Tillie Olsen.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22 May 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Tillie-Olsen. May 04, 2018

Though vaccination-like procedures likely originated in ancient China hundreds of years prior to the life of Edward Jenner, our current vaccination production procedures are largely attributed to the investigations Mr. Jenner conducted in the late 1700s. The son of a prominent vicar, Jenner was educated in general academic disciplines, and then engaged in a series of apprenticeships with well-known surgeons of the time including Daniel Ludlow, and John Hunter. As a practicing family physician and surgeon, Jenner was aware of societal fear over the smallpox infections

that plagued society at this time. Historical medical practice to avoid smallpox infection involved deliberate inoculation with material derived from smallpox lesions. Although this practice did create resistance to infection, recipients of the inoculation faced considerable risks, including a full-blown smallpox infection complete with the disfiguring lesions and unintentional transfer of the infection to family and friends living in close proximity. Based on extensive observation of smallpox infection patterns among the individuals in his medical practice and community, Jenner concluded that individuals infected with cowpox were protected from the related disease smallpox.

Smallpox and cowpox are related in both the pathological appearance of symptoms in infected individuals, and in the viral organism that causes the infection.  Although Jenner didn’t have the experimental means to understand the molecular link between cowpox and smallpox, keen observation of milkmaids who were frequently infected with cowpox, suggested to Jenner that prior infection with cowpox could be protective against smallpox infection.  Using viral laden material scraped from cowpox lesions, Jenner vaccinated numerous individuals by introducing the inoculum into a wound on the upper arm.  He measured protection from smallpox infection by a subsequent infection with smallpox several weeks later.  Interestingly, vaccinated individuals showed none of the pathology traditionally associated with smallpox infection, confirming Jenner’s initial hypothesis regarding the protective effect of prior smallpox infection.  Jenner’s observations from his vaccination experiments were completed in the 1790’s, and a series of papers documenting his observations and explanations were published by the Royal Society of England in the early 1800s.

Of all the subjects followed over the course of Jenner’s experimentation with inoculation of cowpox to prevent smallpox, perhaps none is more well-known than James Phipps, an eight-year old child who was the first recipient of Jenner’s new vaccine protocol.  In this 1894 lithograph by Gaston Melingue, inspired by the story of Phipp’s vaccination, the milkmaid from which the vaccinating material was taken is seen bandaging her hand, while Jenner simultaneously inoculates Phipps in the arm.  Per Jenner’s experimental protocol, Phipps was subsequently infected with smallpox numerous times and showed no pathological indications of smallpox infection at any point following his vaccination.  Whether Phipps was a willing or coerced subject for Jenner’s investigations is debated.  Though Phipps’ father was Jenner’s gardener and thus a poor laborer with little choice to determine when and how to follow his employer’s orders, he was also likely to be a parent fearful about early childhood death due to smallpox infection and may have willingly sought unverified protection for his son.

Jenner’s vaccination studies paved the way for the modern practice of using other less virulent organisms as vaccine material for related, but more damaging microbial infections.  Modern technological advances furthered Jenner’s work by enabling scientists to make molecular changes in the genetic information of even the most virulent pathogens, rendering them harmless pathologically, yet maintaining their capability of inducing an immune response in the recipient.  While current experimental design and testing of vaccine candidates is a far cry from Jenner’s method of preparing vaccine material and choosing scientific subjects, vaccine efficacy is evaluated using Jenner’s method of vaccination followed by exposure to the microbial threat.  Though often mistakenly described as the “father of vaccination”, Jenner’s contribution to the public health benefits of vaccination cannot be underestimated.

 

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

—Alan Turing

 

 

Alan Turing, noted mathematician, was born in London, England in 1912 and died tragically in 1954 from cyanide poisoning. Many consider Turing the founder of the field of computer science for his seminal work in crytography and his theory on the limits of computation. He is certainly the father of the computer science subfield of Artifical Intelligence and the controversial notion of “thinking” machines. Today we see some of the fruits of his original ideas in encrypted online shopping, voice recognition systems such as Siri and Alexa, NASA’s robotics vision systems, and learning algorithms that predict and classify trends for Walmart and Amazon.

Among Turing’s notable achievements are his

• 1936, Universal Turing Machine – a theoretical model of modern day computing sytems,
• 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers”, which proved that a universal algorithmic proof of truth in mathematics cannot exist. That is, “a function on the natural numbers is computable by a human being following an algorithm, ignoring resource limitations, if and only if it is computable by a Turingmachine[1]”,
• WWII cryptography work at Blechley Park, the GCCS wartime station, on decrypting the German Enigma codes,
• 1950, Turing Test Experiment – “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.” —Alan Turing

In 1952 Turing was charged with gross indecency for a homosexual relationship with Arnold Murray. He choose chemical castration and temporary probation over imprisonment for the charges. Turing’s security clearances at GCCS were revoked and he was banned from cryptanalysis research due to the charges. Two years later, a postmortem determined that Turing died from cyanide poisoning. It is still unknown whether his death was a suicide or an accidental poisoning.

Posthumously, Turing was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20^th century and a BBC nationwide poll ranked him 21^st of the 100 most important Britons. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a royal pardon for his crimes and announced “Turing’s Law” to pardon those convicted of homosexuality in England when it was considered a crime.

[1] On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ from Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, (Ser. 2, Vol. 42, 1937);

http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference articles/Bio of AlanTuring.html

Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges, Princeton University Press (November 10, 2014)

 

 

 

Roger Shepard

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Roger Shepard is a Cognitive Psychologist who is considered the father of research on spatial relations. His famous work on mental rotation was, in part, responsible for transforming psychology from a discipline that studied only observable behavior to one that studied behavior and mental processes. Spending most of his career as a professor at Stanford with brief stints at Harvard and Bell Labs, Shepard’s work in perception and cognition included the creation of stunning auditory and visual illusions that helped elucidate the underlying mechanisms of perceptual and cognitive processes. His “Universal Law of Generalization” was instrumental in the development of evolutionary theories of perception and action. 

Shepard was born in 1929 in Palo Alto CA. He completed his Ph. D. at Yale in 1955 under the direction of Social Psychologist Carl Hoveland. His work on mental rotation provided behavioral empirical evidence for visual imagery that was later confirmed by neural imaging. Shepard showed that when comparing two objects viewed from different rotational perspectives, the time to tell whether the objects were the same or different was proportional to the degrees of rotation by which the objects differed (as if the viewers were mentally rotating the objects in their mind to compare them).

Shepard’s theoretical perspective posits that the organization of the brain and mind reflect the organization of the world in which they evolved and developed. It is a perspective that has been influential in many fields including neuroscience, spatial cognition, and evolutionary psychology. Although primarily a visual researcher, Shepard’s theories have also been influential in auditory perception and cognition.

In 1995 Shepard was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Clinton. In 2006 Shepard was awarded the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition. In addition to psychology, his work has influenced a wide range of fields that include education, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and human factors engineering.

 

 

 

Roman Jakobson was a Russian–American linguist and literary theorist. As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend in linguistics during the first half of the 20th century, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century. Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language). He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, the visual arts, and cinema.

Life and work
Jakobson was born in Russia on 11 October 1896[1] to a well-to-do family of Jewish descent, the industrialist Osip Jakobson and chemist Anna Volpert Jakobson,[1] and he developed a fascination with language at a very young age. He studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and then at the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University.[3] As a student he was a leading figure of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and took part in Moscow’s active world of avant-garde art and poetry. The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time (the diachronic approach, in Saussure’s terms). Jakobson, on the other hand, had come into contact with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and developed an approach focused on the way in which language’s structure served its basic function (synchronic approach) – to communicate information between speakers. Jakobson was also well known for his critique of the emergence of sound in film. Jakobson received a master’s degree from Moscow University in 1918.

In Czechoslovakia

1920 was a year of political conflict in Russia, and Jakobson relocated to Prague as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission to continue his doctoral studies. He immersed himself both into the academic and cultural life of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia and established close relationships with a number of Czech poets and literary figures. Jakobson received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1930.[1] He became a professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1933. He also made an impression on Czech academics with his studies of Czech verse. In 1926, together with Vilém Mathesius and others he became one of the founders of the “Prague school” of linguistic theory (other members included Nikolai Trubetzkoy, René Wellek, Jan Mukařovský). There his numerous works on phonetics helped continue to develop his concerns with the structure and function of language. Jakobson’s universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. (This theory achieved its most canonical exposition in a book co-authored with Morris Halle.) This mode of analysis has been since applied to the plane of Saussurean sense by his protégé Michael Silverstein in a series of foundational articles in functionalist linguistic typology.

 

Escapes before the war
Jakobson escaped from Prague in early March 1939[1] via Berlin for Denmark, where he was associated with the Copenhagen linguistic circle, and such intellectuals as Louis Hjelmslev. He fled to Norway on 1 September 1939,[1] and in 1940 walked across the border to Sweden,[1] where he continued his work at the Karolinska Hospital (with works on aphasia and language competence). When Swedish colleagues feared a possible German occupation, he managed to leave on a cargo ship, together with Ernst Cassirer (the former rector of Hamburg University) to New York City in 1941[1] to become part of the wider community of intellectual émigrés who fled there.
Career in the United States and later life[edit]
In New York, he began teaching at The New School, still closely associated with the Czech émigré community during that period. At the École libre des hautes études, a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would also become a key exponent of structuralism. He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield. When the American authorities considered “repatriating” him to Europe, it was Franz Boas who actually saved his life. After the war, he became a consultant to the International Auxiliary Language Association, which would present Interlingua in 1951.
In 1949[1] Jakobson moved to Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1967.[1] In his last decade he maintained an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an honorary Professor Emeritus. In the early 1960s Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1975.[4]
Jakobson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 18 July 1982.[1] His widow died in 1986. His first wife, who was born in 1908, died in 2000.