WITHIN our lifetimes, our hearts will beat some 1.5 billion times.
That’s on average. What’s amazing is that it’s the same figure not only for all mammals but all animals, from the tiniest hamsters and rats on one end to elephants and whales, on the other.
The theoretical physicist Geoffrey West presents this fact as a warning against the dangers of linear thinking.
In his book “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies” (Penguin Press, 2017), West explains how linear thinking, especially in public health, can be disastrous—as it was for one particular elephant in 1962.
A psychiatrist and a zoologist wanted to figure out how much LSD humans could take for it to have a therapeutic effect, instead of doing harm. To find out, they experimented on an Asiatic elephant.
Why an elephant? It turns out that Asiatic elephants go through a two-week period, called musth, when they become highly aggressive and even dangerous. The scientists suspected that these episodes were triggered when elephants’ brains produced LSD. What they knew then was that the safe dose for a cat was one-tenth of a milligram for every kilogram of body weight.
They found a subject in an Oklahoma zoo named Tusko, who weighed some 3,000 kilos. Using linear thinking, they injected nearly 300 milligrams of LSD into the poor, unsuspecting elephant. Within five minutes, the creature fell on its side and began convulsing. Less than 100 minutes later, it died.
These days, the medical community knows better.
It knows that other factors, not just weight, need to be factored in when deciding how much medicine human beings and other animals can take. One factor is the speed at which organisms burn calories. Another is the way in which drugs travel across membranes and into tissues and specific organs. Surface areas, not just weight, must be part of the calculation.
“This is one of the main reasons,” West wrote, “it takes so long for new drugs to obtain approval for their general use.”
There is still no vaccine nor direct treatment for the new coronavirus behind Covid-19. It has only been nine weeks since this virus was confirmed. If it feels longer, it’s probably because the numbers are staggering: more than 85,000 infections and nearly 3,000 deaths since the year began.
Whenever I see the numbers on that amazing tracker that Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering built, I remind myself to take deep breaths to keep from panicking. I don’t want to use up my 1.5 billion heartbeats anytime soon, thank you.
I also remind myself of recent (mainstream media) stories about clinical trials that are ongoing in China and the United States. At least one involves a broad-spectrum antiviral named remdesivir, which sounds like a character from Tolkien. Other trials involve drugs that were already in development for other ailments, among them Ebola, malaria, and HIV/AIDS.
In an article that scientificamerican.com ran on Feb. 28, Tanya Lewis wrote that a man in Washington State who had been given remdesivir, after returning from Wuhan, “has made a good recovery.” A much larger sample and more clinical trials will be needed. Still, it feels good to have a glimmer of hope.
Cynics among us (or within us) will say that some big pharmaceutical corporation and savvy market players will make a killing from remdesivir or whichever treatment turns out to be the one that will slow Covid-19’s march across the continents. And they probably will be right.
I prefer to focus on the reminder that awesome discoveries are being made and will, at some point, come to light. I take the recommended precautions: avoiding crowds, keeping my hands clean, getting enough rest. I nudge doors open with an elbow when I can. After all this anxiety has blown over, we will understand the world we live in a little better. That’s something to look forward to.