Today, I am thankful for those who endeavor to know the unknown.
Several years back, many of us had a hearty chuckle when the then United States Director of the Department of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was asked a question about the government’s knowledge regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As the astute statesmen pontificated, he told the room full of Pentagon reporters about three interesting entities: those things we know we know (the ‘known knowns’), those things we know that we do not know (‘known unknowns’), and those things we don’t know that we don’t know (the ‘unknown unknowns’). Befuddled, the news pundits would proceed to mock the seasoned politician for some time. However, the stark truth of the matter is that Rumsfeld was indeed correct. Nearly fifty years prior to this news conference, American psychologists had touted the ‘unknown unknowns’ in the Johari Window, a four-by-four table that distinguishes our self-knowledge vs. the knowledge others have about us. For many years leading up to Rumsfeld’s speech, similar concepts were also espoused by philosophers, project managers, and even government agencies (e.g., the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA]).
In all honesty, I believe we fail to truly understand the magnitude of any unknown until after it begins to materialize. This uncertainty poses such a challenge that any risk mitigation is a veritable conundrum. Case in point is the recent coronavirus pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Early in any outbreak with an unknown pathogen, epidemiologists cannot fully appreciate its full magnitude for morbidity until the clinical infection begins to declare itself. By the time we fully comprehend a novel pathogen’s propensity to spread or cause severe disease, the virus may already have gotten out of control.
For this reason, we must continually perform research in microbiology, the field dedicated to bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses. By understanding the make-up of an organism and testing it in preclinical models, we might better understand the propensity for any disease to cause significant human disease. In turn, treatment can be identified to quell the infection. We can thank many great scientists, like Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Robert Koch, and Friedrich Loeffler, who helped us understand the ‘germ’ theory. Each of them lived in the mid 19th Century, but nearly two centuries earlier, a great philosopher and English polymath got the world interested in the microscopic realm.
Robert Hooke was born on this day (July 18) in 1635 on the Isle of Wright in England. As the youngest of four children, Hooke was a rather sickly, frail child, ultimately spending most of his childhood alone at home. In his solitary world, he became inquisitive about the world around him, so he took to painting and playing with mechanical objects, like clocks and toys. The natural world fascinated him, so he began to study it. As Hooke grew older and his health improved, he moved to Oxford, where he hobnobbed with some of the greatest minds of his time – Robert Boyle, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Christopher Wren. He became an apprentice to Boyle, and his knowledge and interest in various scientific topics – astronomy, geometry, chemistry, and physics – grew. Hooke’s achievements are too numerous to list here, but I did want to call out one interest he had the propelled the science of microbiology forward.
As Hooke began to study physics, he began to believe that the world around us, like the air we breathe, was compiled of small particles. So, he devised a compound microscope to analyze anything small he can fit under his dual-lens device. He would then draw these items in excruciating detail, many of which were chronicled in a now famous scientific volume, Micrographia. One day, while examining wood and plants under his microscope, he noticed these living items were comprised of small box-sided units he called ‘cells’. Years later, he worked with Leeuwenhoek to describe the ‘little animals’ that were crawling across his microscope, the first evidence of bacteria and protozoa. Others would eventually follow suit, and, before we knew it, the field of microbiology was born.
We don’t often known what we know until we do. I’m both satisfied, and humbled, knowing that we still have so much to learn.
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