The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men Read Online Free Page B
Author: Bill Shore
around. We are surrounded by the monuments of men and women who failed to recognize the stop signs along their journey to solving a problem or creating something new.
As Dan Pallotta, founder of the ambitious and wildly successful AIDSRides, bicycle rides to raise funds for AIDS service organizations, once said to me: “Don’t you suppose someone must have argued to Henry Ford: ‘But that’s crazy—you’d have to build these gas station places all over the country and pave these incredibly long roads.’” Great imaginations are almost always unreasonable, but they almost always triumph in the end.
Most of us won’t cure malaria or invent the next automobile. So why are these elements of breakthrough thinking important in our own lives? Can they apply to each of us? They do if we believe that the organizations, communities, and world of which we are a part can do better. They are important if we’re frustrated with the slow and incremental pace of social change, or if we wish to play some small role in lightening the suffering and struggles of those less fortunate with whom we share this planet. They are the qualities that allow some people, gifted with great vision, to insist that, rather than taking the reasonable approach of adapting to the world, the world, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, must adapt itself to the unreasonable man.
CHAPTER 2
WHATEVER IT TAKES
Researchers at Edinburgh University’s Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology have isolated part of a protein which allows [malaria] to become resistant to new treatments. . . .
Professor Malcolm Walkinshaw, of Edinburgh University, said: “We can now use this protein structure to design a new generation of drugs which makes it possible to overcome resistant strains of malaria.
“People have studied this protein for a long time, but until now, no one has been able to determine its detailed structure. This is a real breakthrough.”
—BBC News, “Malaria Treatment Breakthrough,”
April 22, 2003
S TEVE HOFFMAN IS A DOCTOR who wants to develop a vaccine to prevent malaria. If it works it will save the lives of millions of children. If it doesn’t, he will find company in the ranks of countless others who have gone before him, tried, and failed. And millions will continue to perish in an agonizing death.
While there are vaccines for bacteria and viruses, there has never been a vaccine for malaria, or for any parasitic disease.
The reasons are both scientific and political. The parasite is complex, elusive, and even brilliant, in an evolutionary sense. And most of those whom it infects are so voiceless, vulnerable, and marginalized that there are no markets—economic or political—for serving them or solving the problems they face. They are victims not only of malaria but also of chronic political laryngitis. And their condition persists not because of the paucity of solutions, but because they have no political voice. Society has not been fully persuaded to pay for solutions that already exist. Nor are there many who are willing to share in the sacrifice of time and money that would be required to sustain those solutions and take them to scale.
Instead their fate depends not on traditional approaches but on an emerging new cocktail of entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and science—stirred by imagination—a cocktail being developed by Steve Hoffman and a handful of colleagues and competitors around the globe.
AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
Steve Hoffman has practiced medicine for more than twenty-five years, but his ambition has required him to wear many hats: that of naval officer, business entrepreneur, research scientist, author, evangelist, employer, fundraiser,
humanitarian, and biotech engineer. He has the necessary personality traits to go with them: brilliant, innovative, confident, arrogant, impatient, stubborn, charming, abrasive, driven, determined, and competitive.
One particular quality dominates all of the others, giving
As Dan Pallotta, founder of the ambitious and wildly successful AIDSRides, bicycle rides to raise funds for AIDS service organizations, once said to me: “Don’t you suppose someone must have argued to Henry Ford: ‘But that’s crazy—you’d have to build these gas station places all over the country and pave these incredibly long roads.’” Great imaginations are almost always unreasonable, but they almost always triumph in the end.
Most of us won’t cure malaria or invent the next automobile. So why are these elements of breakthrough thinking important in our own lives? Can they apply to each of us? They do if we believe that the organizations, communities, and world of which we are a part can do better. They are important if we’re frustrated with the slow and incremental pace of social change, or if we wish to play some small role in lightening the suffering and struggles of those less fortunate with whom we share this planet. They are the qualities that allow some people, gifted with great vision, to insist that, rather than taking the reasonable approach of adapting to the world, the world, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, must adapt itself to the unreasonable man.
CHAPTER 2
WHATEVER IT TAKES
Researchers at Edinburgh University’s Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology have isolated part of a protein which allows [malaria] to become resistant to new treatments. . . .
Professor Malcolm Walkinshaw, of Edinburgh University, said: “We can now use this protein structure to design a new generation of drugs which makes it possible to overcome resistant strains of malaria.
“People have studied this protein for a long time, but until now, no one has been able to determine its detailed structure. This is a real breakthrough.”
—BBC News, “Malaria Treatment Breakthrough,”
April 22, 2003
S TEVE HOFFMAN IS A DOCTOR who wants to develop a vaccine to prevent malaria. If it works it will save the lives of millions of children. If it doesn’t, he will find company in the ranks of countless others who have gone before him, tried, and failed. And millions will continue to perish in an agonizing death.
While there are vaccines for bacteria and viruses, there has never been a vaccine for malaria, or for any parasitic disease.
The reasons are both scientific and political. The parasite is complex, elusive, and even brilliant, in an evolutionary sense. And most of those whom it infects are so voiceless, vulnerable, and marginalized that there are no markets—economic or political—for serving them or solving the problems they face. They are victims not only of malaria but also of chronic political laryngitis. And their condition persists not because of the paucity of solutions, but because they have no political voice. Society has not been fully persuaded to pay for solutions that already exist. Nor are there many who are willing to share in the sacrifice of time and money that would be required to sustain those solutions and take them to scale.
Instead their fate depends not on traditional approaches but on an emerging new cocktail of entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and science—stirred by imagination—a cocktail being developed by Steve Hoffman and a handful of colleagues and competitors around the globe.
AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
Steve Hoffman has practiced medicine for more than twenty-five years, but his ambition has required him to wear many hats: that of naval officer, business entrepreneur, research scientist, author, evangelist, employer, fundraiser,
humanitarian, and biotech engineer. He has the necessary personality traits to go with them: brilliant, innovative, confident, arrogant, impatient, stubborn, charming, abrasive, driven, determined, and competitive.
One particular quality dominates all of the others, giving
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