In the late 1980s, Burt Dorman was ready to get out of the vaccination game. A biophysical chemist, he’d spent years running a successful company making animal vaccines—a dozen of them, against diseases like feline leukemia and vesicular stomatitis. Now Dorman was starting a new company in a new field, aiming at disease diagnostics.
And then the AIDS epidemic hit. The first hint that a new disease was killing people had come in 1981, in a publication called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. What followed were years, decades even, of tragedy and homophobia-tainted ignorance. Still, by 1987 the first vaccine trial was underway, the World Health Organization had launched a global fight against the contagion, the playwright Larry Kramer had started the activist group ACT UP, and the first antiretroviral drug, AZT, was available.
Even so, science was still woefully short of understanding the plague or coming up with a vaccine that could prevent it. By the end of the decade, more than 100,000 people were infected in the United States. Absent treatment, the mortality rate for these patients, then as now, was effectively 100 percent. Dorman knew vaccines; he started talking to other people in the vaccinology world about being part of the fight. Don Francis, a longtime disease hunter then with the Centers for Disease Control and one of the main characters in the book And the Band Played On, got in touch—Dorman had beaten feline leukemia, and it’s caused by the same type of virus that triggers AIDS. Why not try to tackle HIV?
I don’t pretend to have a full answer. I do think that we need to recognize that any society’s idea of truth is always the product of an argument, and we need to get better at winning that argument. Democracy is not polite. It’s often a shouting match in a public square. We need to be involved in the argument if we are to have any chance of winning it. And as far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real.
The sometimes challenging technical aspects of the book should not dissuade anyone interested in the promise of intelligent systems. “The Book of Why” not only delivers a valuable lesson on the history of ideas but provides the conceptual tools needed to judge just what big data can and cannot deliver. Notably, “causal questions can never be answered from data alone.”
Moore’s astringency always enlivens her observations, but rarely her assessments, even when critical. In print, at least, she is a wit without malice. See what can be done.
The grotesque, meaningless perfection of this ending to the Outline trilogy leads me to one conclusion only. Rachel Cusk must be our era’s new feminist Friedrich Nietzsche. In any case, she definitely deserves that Guggenheim. She gets a “kudos” from me.