THE TTALK QUOTES


On Global Trade & Investment
Published Three Times a Week (with occasional bonus quotes) by
The Global Business Dialogue, Inc.
Washington, DC  Tel: 202-559-9316
No.17 of 2020
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11 2020

Click HERE for last Thursday's quote from Australia on
Huawei and 5G.
A VIRUS IS

 "a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein."

Peter Medawar
from Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology
1983
CONTEXT
Peter Medawar was a British biologist, Nobel prize winner, and a prolific author, though in fact we have yet to read any of his books. Our source for today’s quote is not the one given above but Bill Bryson’s more recent and very engaging book The Body, A Guide for Occupants .  Here is the full paragraph with today’s featured quote:

A virus, in the immortal words of the British Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, is “a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.”  Actually, a lot of viruses are not bad news at all, at least not to humans. Viruses are a little weird, not quite living but by no means dead. Outside living cells, they are just inert things. They don’t eat or breathe or do much of anything. They have no means of locomotion. We must go out and collect them—off door handles or handshakes or drawn in with the air we breathe. They do not propel themselves; they hitchhike.  Most of the time, they are as lifeless as a mote of dust, but put them into a living cell, and they will burst into animate existence and reproduce as furiously as any living thing.

Bryson continues with several fascinating details about viruses: how small they are, how long they can remain dormant – sometimes thousands of years. But then he moves on. He has, after all, a whole body to cover.

COMMENT
Y our editor came across Bill Bryson’s The Body in December and was sufficiently taken with it to inflict copies on two grandsons—both 13. (Doubtless, it was not the most exciting Christmas present for either one, and we have no idea whether either boy has read it.) In truth, we also suspected that something from that book would make its way to a TTALK Quote. We had no idea, however, that it would become quite so devastatingly relevant.

After all, it wasn’t until December 31, that China notified the World Health Organization of the first cases of the coronavirus in Wuhan. Earlier today (March 11) in Geneva, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that “COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.”  He made that statement after noting that the world has now seen more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and causing some 4,291 deaths. And all those numbers, Dr. Tedros said, are expected to increase.

As for the big questions: how long, how many, and at what cost to relationship, business and personal—all we can do is acknowledge them. So, we’ll end this with a paradox and a bit of folk wisdom. The paradox begins with the observation, the belief, that “optimisms is a poor basis for public policy.”  You nod your head in agreement and wonder, where’s the paradox? The sentiment is true enough—especially as a counter to a do-nothing approach to problems. Fundamentally, however, optimism is essential. Almost nothing can be achieved without the belief that the goal is in fact achievable, that is, without optimism.

As for the folk wisdom, we credit the Japanese with the saying that “None of us is as smart as all of us.” And in this COVID-19 environment, we find ourselves looking to the Republic of Korea for guidance. From what we have heard, Korea deserves high marks (and perhaps more than a little imitation) for its aggressive approach to testing for COVID-19. 

Take care. Santé!  We’ll all get through this.
SOURCES & LINKS
The Body, A Guide for Occupants is the Amazon page for this most recent non-fiction work by Bill Bryson. This book was the source for today’s featured quote.

At the WHO takes you to a YouTube clip of Dr. Tedros’s press conference earlier today. This was the source for some of the quotes in the Comment Section.

Tracking COVID-19 is a page on the WHO website devoted to this pandemic.

A Precept.  We credit the late Lawrence A. Fox of the National Association of Manufacturers with the repeated observation that “Optimism is a poor basis for public policy.”



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