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Fast Access to Records Helps Fight Epidemics
By MILT FREUDENHEIM, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Public health departments around the country have long scrutinized data from local hospitals for indications that diseases like influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, syphilis and asthma might be on the rise, and to monitor the health consequences of heat waves, frigid weather or other natural phenomena. In the years since 9/11, this scrutiny has come to include signs of possible bioterrorism.
When medical records were maintained mainly on paper, it could take weeks to find out that an infection was becoming more common or that tainted greens had appeared on grocery shelves. But the growing prevalence of electronic medical records has had an unexpected benefit: By combing through the data now received almost continuously from hospitals and other medical facilities, some health departments are spotting and combating outbreaks with unprecedented speed.
More than one-third of the nation’s 5,000 acute care hospitals now use electronic medical records, and the share of primary care doctors using them has doubled to 40 percent in the last two years, said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the Obama administration’s national coordinator for health information technology.
The technology’s spread is helping “officials faced with events of public health significance to know sooner, act faster and manage better,” said Dr. Seth Foldy, a senior adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In February, public health officials in Michigan noted an increase in electronic reports from clinical laboratories indicating E. coli cases in several counties. Eleven patients were identified, including six who were hospitalized.
In less than a week, officials had enough evidence to warn the public that the infection appeared to be linked to clover sprouts in food at the Jimmy John’s sandwich chain, said James Collins, director of the communicable diseases division at the state’s Department of Community Health. The chain quickly removed the sprouts, and by April, the 11-state outbreak was over.
“You can see it happen in real time and zero in on the cause faster,” said David A. Ross, director of the Public Health Informatics Institute, a nonprofit organization that helps write digital standards. “That can save both lives and money.”
In Massachusetts, the data are being used to prevent hepatitis infections. Medical labs transmit more than 100,000 electronic reports annually to the state health department. Names are confidential, though available to certain medical personnel. The agency’s software sorts through the reports and every year identifies more than 1,500 cases of hepatitis B for follow-up.
Infected women ages 14 to 44 get special attention. Health officials alert their medical providers to infections; they in turn identify anyone who is pregnant or recently gave birth. Their newborns are vaccinated and then monitored.
Without that prompt protection, those babies risk lifelong infection with hepatitis B and its consequences, liver disease, cirrhosis and cancer. With paper records, locating at-risk babies would take weeks or months, said Kevin Cranston, director of the infectious disease bureau at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
“That would be too late to be of benefit to the newborn,” he said. Although the C.D.C. recommends prompt hepatitis B vaccination for all newborns, nationally, four in 10 did not get that protection, according to an agency report last year.
When the H1N1 flu pandemic broke out in 2009, Wisconsin laboratories generated thousands of positive H1N1 test results, said Dr. Foldy, who was then chief medical officer of the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange.
“We were able to route this electronically into our case management system to alert public health nurses,” Dr. Foldy said.
“Because we were getting near real-time information from hospitals, we could see that even with the large numbers of emergency room visits for flulike symptoms, very few were being admitted as inpatients,” he added. This provided an early glimpse of how the pandemic was rising and then declining.
Public health officials in Marion County, Ind., were among the first to sound the all-clear in the flu outbreak by tracking the drop in cases from electronic reports from hospitals and laboratories, forwarded by the Indiana Health Information Exchange.
More than 150 health information exchanges are now operating or being set up across the country. (These differ from the insurance exchanges mandated under the Affordable Care Act.) Each exchange receives electronic medical data from clinical laboratories, hospital admissions offices and emergency rooms and relays it to relevant public health agencies.
Health care providers are required to provide pertinent data electronically to local and state public health officials, who feed into a national digital network coordinated by the C.D.C. in Atlanta.
Using an electronic records registry, the Urban Health Plan, a network of clinics in the South Bronx and Queens, was able to triple its caseload of mostly young, low-income asthma patients to 8,100. “We are in the heart of asthma country,” said Dr. Samuel De Leon, a lung specialist who is Urban Health’s chief medical officer.
His group compared spending per patient with a Medicaid managed care plan in the city that did not then have electronic monitoring. Using its record system to keep tabs on its patients, Dr. De Leon said, Urban Health was able to reduce emergency room visits and hospital admissions.
“For children, we saved about 39 percent of the cost of care. For adults, savings were in the 25 percent range,” he said.
New York City health officials began using electronic medical records six years ago. After reviewing the incoming medical data, city health department officials recently discovered that smoking rates are a little higher in Staten Island than in the other boroughs.
Now, instead of sending trainers on routine visits to every primary care doctor to help them learn to use electronic records to improve care, the visits are concentrated to help those physicians whose patients need it most.
“We can identify and monitor trends in high-priority diseases and health problems by geography and groups,” said Dr. Amanda Parsons, a deputy commissioner at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “We can tell where things are improving or getting worse.”
ROUGH SEAS A 19th-century engraving depicts John Cabot on his second voyage, reaching what is now Newfoundland in 1497. His first voyage was aborted, and his third was a mystery, with Cabot thought to have perished at sea.
Discovery of a £16 Advance Sheds Light on John Cabot’s Adventures
By GUY GUGLIOTTA, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
In early 1496, a Venetian sea captain named Giovanni Caboto appeared in the southern English port city of Bristol. He had no money, but carried a warrant from King Henry VII to obtain a ship and sail on a voyage of trade and discovery.
England would call him John Cabot, and from 1496 to 1498 — less than a decade after Christopher Columbus — he set sail three times for the New World. The first voyage was aborted, but on the second he made landfall in what is now Newfoundland and claimed North America for England and the Roman Catholic Church.
That much is known. But of his third voyage there is nothing. He left Bristol and apparently vanished — slaughtered by enemies, taken by disease or swallowed by the sea.
And that is not the only enduring mystery about Cabot. Who helped him? Who bankrolled him? Did he really disappear?
But scholars first had to untangle another mystery: the authenticity of spectacular claims made by Alwyn Ruddock, a historian at the University of London who had researched Cabot for more than half her life.
Dr. Ruddock several times promised a book, but never wrote it. Instead, before she died in 2005 at 89, a childless widow, she ordered her executor to destroy her research. Seventy-eight bags of papers were shredded and incinerated, leaving scholars astounded.
Now an important piece of the Ruddock riddle has been solved. In 2010, an international team of scholars working together in what is called the Cabot Project came upon a set of 514-year-old Italian ledgers that Dr. Ruddock had found decades earlier but which had disappeared from view. They showed that in the spring of 1496, Cabot received seed money for his voyages from the London branch of a Florentine banking house called the Bardi.
The explorer was long thought to have been financed by merchants in Bristol. But the new findings, published this spring in the journal Historical Research, demonstrate that he was staked at least in part by the same Italian financiers who helped his illustrious contemporaries like Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias and, of course, Columbus.
“The entries are tremendously important, because in one step they bring the Cabot voyages into line with the others,” said the project’s leader, Evan T. Jones, a maritime historian at the University of Bristol. “Italian merchant capital was very important to all of them.”
Just as important, he said, the ledgers provide the most convincing proof for Dr. Ruddock’s claim that she found about 25 Cabot documents never before seen by modern scholars. “She wasn’t making anything up,” Dr. Jones said.
His own detective work began nearly seven years ago, shortly after he read Dr. Ruddock’s obituary in The Guardian. Her decision to have her papers destroyed “left me shocked and sickened,” he said. “I decided to find out if there was any wiggle room.”
There was. Dr. Ruddock had had a book contract with the University of Exeter Press. They had no manuscript, the editors told him, but there was a file of correspondence. He was welcome to inspect it.
It contained a 1992 book proposal in which Dr. Ruddock outlined an incredible tale, largely untold. The proposal was both deliberately vague, masking sources from colleagues and competitors, and deliberately provocative, promising important new revelations.
In 2007, Dr. Jones analyzed the proposal in an article in Historical Research. Dr. Ruddock had described how Cabot, long thought to be a penniless drifter, was closely connected with London’s influential Italian émigré community. He enlisted the help of a papal diplomat, Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, to wangle a charter from Henry VII.
Her most tantalizing assertions concerned the third voyage, in 1498, about which nothing is known. She claimed that Cabot had not disappeared.
Instead, her proposal said, Cabot left Bristol with five ships carrying Italian friars, including Carbonariis, intent on establishing a mission in the North Atlantic lands that he had visited the previous year.
The friars disembarked on the Newfoundland coast, Dr. Ruddock said, to build a church and establish a religious colony. This momentous new information, if true, meant that Cabot and Carbonariis had founded the first European Christian settlement in North America.
And Cabot did not vanish. Instead, he sailed south along the North American coast, claiming everything he saw for the British Crown. According to Dr. Ruddock, he was the first European to see what is today the United States.
Dr. Ruddock said in her outline that Cabot finally reached the coast of South America, where he ran into one of Columbus’s captains, probably Alonso de Ojeda, who warned him off. The Caribbean was a Spanish pond at the time, and Henry VII was trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella to marry their daughter to his son, the Prince of Wales.
Cabot turned back and reached Newfoundland in early 1500, Dr. Ruddock said, then returned to Bristol, where he died four months after his arrival.
While all of this is plausible, much of it is not yet documented. Yet the Cabot Project — with a big assist from serendipity — has filled in many of Dr. Ruddock’s blank spaces, and her assertions have proved out so far.
In 2010, a colleague told Dr. Jones that he had made a lucky find on Amazon: Dr. Ruddock’s personal copy of the seminal work on Cabot, James A. Williamson’s “The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII,” published in 1962.
Dr. Jones traced the seller, Lisa Shanley, who had bought Dr. Ruddock’s modest house in Hampshire and was selling off the contents of its library. She was aware of the Ruddock story and invited Dr. Jones and his colleague Margaret Condon for a visit.
Dr. Ruddock’s study was still intact — including a shoe cupboard she had used for documents, the sticky labels still affixed to its pigeonholes. One of them read, “The Bardi firm, of London.”
“We knew from Ruddock’s notes that an Italian banker had supported the voyage, but didn’t know which one,” Dr. Jones said. Now they did. He got in touch with Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, an economic historian of the late Middle Ages who had already scouted family archives in Florence looking for Dr. Ruddock’s sources without success. Now, given the Bardi name, he was able to find company records in the archives of the Guicciardini, another prominent Florentine family. (The curator, a Guicciardini family member, was too young to remember Dr. Ruddock.)
“There was a reading room and a big back room with the shelves neatly organized,” Dr. Guidi-Bruscoli said. Bardi’s London office periodically sent its ledgers home, and each book had a title and a date. Dr. Guidi-Bruscoli opened the relevant ledger and there it was:
“John Cabot, of Venice, on 27 April [1496], is debited for 10 pounds sterling, paid in cash ... so that he could go and find the new land.” A second entry recorded an additional payment of 6 pounds, 13 shillings and 4 pence.
There is no obvious reason the Bardi Company would give even a paltry 16 pounds — enough for a month at sea — to somebody like Cabot, but “my best guess,” Dr. Jones said, is that the bank was trying to curry favor with Carbonariis, whose diplomatic duties included collecting taxes for the Vatican and using the Italian banks to send it to Rome.
“He’s somebody you really want to keep sweet, if you’re a banker,” Dr. Jones said. “My guess is that he liked Cabot and steered the Bardi to him. The Bardi jumped on it, because the friar could do other great things for them.”
To Advance, Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself.
But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.
Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.
In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.
To show how scientists depend on ignorance, Dr. Firestein has written a short, highly entertaining book aimed at nonscientists and students who want to be scientists.
The book comes at an important time. Today’s most vociferous scientific controversies turn on different interpretations of facts — about climate change, about contraception, about evolution. When politics are injected, the shouting grows louder, the thinking muddier. Uncertainty is a dirty word.
Dr. Firestein, by contrast, celebrates a tolerance for uncertainty, the pleasures of scientific mystery and the cultivation of doubt. If more people embraced the seductive appeal of uncertainty, he says, it might take some acrimony out of our public debates.
Dr. Firestein got the idea for his book by teaching a course on cellular and molecular neuroscience, based on a 1,414-page textbook that, at 7.7 pounds, weighs more than twice as much as a human brain. He eventually realized that his students must think that pretty much everything in neuroscience is known. “This could not be more wrong,” he writes. “I had, by teaching this course diligently, given the students the idea that science is an accumulation of facts.
“When I sit down with colleagues over a beer at a meeting, we don’t go over facts,” Dr. Firestein writes. “We don’t talk about what’s known. We talk about what we’d like to figure out, about what needs to be done.”
He realized he was failing to teach ignorance, the most critical part of the scientific enterprise, which led to the creation of a course titled “SNC3429 Ignorance.”Dr. Firestein likes to tease students in the class about what kind of grade they want: Is it better to get an A or an F in ignorance?
In his book, Dr. Firestein writes that conducting science is something like searching for a black cat in a dark room — very difficult, especially when, as is often the case, it turns out there is no cat.
To explore scientific groping in the dark, Dr. Firestein invites university colleagues from various disciplines to talk to his students about what they don’t know.
“They come and tell us about what they would like to know, what they think is critical to know, how they might get to know it, what will happen if they do find this or that thing out, what might happen if they don’t, about what they didn’t know 10 or 20 years ago and know now, or still don’t know,” he writes. “They talk about the current state of their ignorance.”
Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist at Hunter College and the City University of New York and Dr. Firestein’s wife, studies the minds of animals. She wonders if there is a smooth progression of mental function as animals become more evolved, or if there is a mysterious discontinuity that separates human consciousness from whatever is experienced by other animals.
The problem is that “mind” tends to be circularly defined as something that only humans have. According to Dr. Reiss, this definition is useless. It creates ignorance in the wrong way — by appearing to mean something when it means nothing.
“Why do we think animals don’t think?” she said. “We begin with a negative starting assumption and then must prove that they do.”
In exploring animal minds, Dr. Reiss does the opposite: She assumes that they can think and patiently gives them opportunities to demonstrate their abilities. To gasps of surprise, she has shown that dolphins and elephants, like humans and chimpanzees, can recognize themselves in a mirror.
These experiments do not answer questions so much as raise more of them, Dr. Firestein notes. “And questions are more relevant than answers,” he adds.
But not all ignorance is valuable, of course. “It has to be really good ignorance, the kind that leads to ever deeper questions,” Dr. Firestein said. “This might make nonscientists more interested in what scientists do — we’re all ignorant together.”
To get a feel for how scientists really think, he offered this advice: Next time you meet a scientist — at a dinner party, at your child’s school, just by chance — don’t ask her to explain what she does. Ask her what she’s trying to figure out.
By MILT FREUDENHEIM, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Public health departments around the country have long scrutinized data from local hospitals for indications that diseases like influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, syphilis and asthma might be on the rise, and to monitor the health consequences of heat waves, frigid weather or other natural phenomena. In the years since 9/11, this scrutiny has come to include signs of possible bioterrorism.
When medical records were maintained mainly on paper, it could take weeks to find out that an infection was becoming more common or that tainted greens had appeared on grocery shelves. But the growing prevalence of electronic medical records has had an unexpected benefit: By combing through the data now received almost continuously from hospitals and other medical facilities, some health departments are spotting and combating outbreaks with unprecedented speed.
More than one-third of the nation’s 5,000 acute care hospitals now use electronic medical records, and the share of primary care doctors using them has doubled to 40 percent in the last two years, said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the Obama administration’s national coordinator for health information technology.
The technology’s spread is helping “officials faced with events of public health significance to know sooner, act faster and manage better,” said Dr. Seth Foldy, a senior adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In February, public health officials in Michigan noted an increase in electronic reports from clinical laboratories indicating E. coli cases in several counties. Eleven patients were identified, including six who were hospitalized.
In less than a week, officials had enough evidence to warn the public that the infection appeared to be linked to clover sprouts in food at the Jimmy John’s sandwich chain, said James Collins, director of the communicable diseases division at the state’s Department of Community Health. The chain quickly removed the sprouts, and by April, the 11-state outbreak was over.
“You can see it happen in real time and zero in on the cause faster,” said David A. Ross, director of the Public Health Informatics Institute, a nonprofit organization that helps write digital standards. “That can save both lives and money.”
In Massachusetts, the data are being used to prevent hepatitis infections. Medical labs transmit more than 100,000 electronic reports annually to the state health department. Names are confidential, though available to certain medical personnel. The agency’s software sorts through the reports and every year identifies more than 1,500 cases of hepatitis B for follow-up.
Infected women ages 14 to 44 get special attention. Health officials alert their medical providers to infections; they in turn identify anyone who is pregnant or recently gave birth. Their newborns are vaccinated and then monitored.
Without that prompt protection, those babies risk lifelong infection with hepatitis B and its consequences, liver disease, cirrhosis and cancer. With paper records, locating at-risk babies would take weeks or months, said Kevin Cranston, director of the infectious disease bureau at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
“That would be too late to be of benefit to the newborn,” he said. Although the C.D.C. recommends prompt hepatitis B vaccination for all newborns, nationally, four in 10 did not get that protection, according to an agency report last year.
When the H1N1 flu pandemic broke out in 2009, Wisconsin laboratories generated thousands of positive H1N1 test results, said Dr. Foldy, who was then chief medical officer of the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange.
“We were able to route this electronically into our case management system to alert public health nurses,” Dr. Foldy said.
“Because we were getting near real-time information from hospitals, we could see that even with the large numbers of emergency room visits for flulike symptoms, very few were being admitted as inpatients,” he added. This provided an early glimpse of how the pandemic was rising and then declining.
Public health officials in Marion County, Ind., were among the first to sound the all-clear in the flu outbreak by tracking the drop in cases from electronic reports from hospitals and laboratories, forwarded by the Indiana Health Information Exchange.
More than 150 health information exchanges are now operating or being set up across the country. (These differ from the insurance exchanges mandated under the Affordable Care Act.) Each exchange receives electronic medical data from clinical laboratories, hospital admissions offices and emergency rooms and relays it to relevant public health agencies.
Health care providers are required to provide pertinent data electronically to local and state public health officials, who feed into a national digital network coordinated by the C.D.C. in Atlanta.
Using an electronic records registry, the Urban Health Plan, a network of clinics in the South Bronx and Queens, was able to triple its caseload of mostly young, low-income asthma patients to 8,100. “We are in the heart of asthma country,” said Dr. Samuel De Leon, a lung specialist who is Urban Health’s chief medical officer.
His group compared spending per patient with a Medicaid managed care plan in the city that did not then have electronic monitoring. Using its record system to keep tabs on its patients, Dr. De Leon said, Urban Health was able to reduce emergency room visits and hospital admissions.
“For children, we saved about 39 percent of the cost of care. For adults, savings were in the 25 percent range,” he said.
New York City health officials began using electronic medical records six years ago. After reviewing the incoming medical data, city health department officials recently discovered that smoking rates are a little higher in Staten Island than in the other boroughs.
Now, instead of sending trainers on routine visits to every primary care doctor to help them learn to use electronic records to improve care, the visits are concentrated to help those physicians whose patients need it most.
“We can identify and monitor trends in high-priority diseases and health problems by geography and groups,” said Dr. Amanda Parsons, a deputy commissioner at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “We can tell where things are improving or getting worse.”
ROUGH SEAS A 19th-century engraving depicts John Cabot on his second voyage, reaching what is now Newfoundland in 1497. His first voyage was aborted, and his third was a mystery, with Cabot thought to have perished at sea.
Discovery of a £16 Advance Sheds Light on John Cabot’s Adventures
By GUY GUGLIOTTA, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
In early 1496, a Venetian sea captain named Giovanni Caboto appeared in the southern English port city of Bristol. He had no money, but carried a warrant from King Henry VII to obtain a ship and sail on a voyage of trade and discovery.
England would call him John Cabot, and from 1496 to 1498 — less than a decade after Christopher Columbus — he set sail three times for the New World. The first voyage was aborted, but on the second he made landfall in what is now Newfoundland and claimed North America for England and the Roman Catholic Church.
That much is known. But of his third voyage there is nothing. He left Bristol and apparently vanished — slaughtered by enemies, taken by disease or swallowed by the sea.
And that is not the only enduring mystery about Cabot. Who helped him? Who bankrolled him? Did he really disappear?
But scholars first had to untangle another mystery: the authenticity of spectacular claims made by Alwyn Ruddock, a historian at the University of London who had researched Cabot for more than half her life.
Dr. Ruddock several times promised a book, but never wrote it. Instead, before she died in 2005 at 89, a childless widow, she ordered her executor to destroy her research. Seventy-eight bags of papers were shredded and incinerated, leaving scholars astounded.
Now an important piece of the Ruddock riddle has been solved. In 2010, an international team of scholars working together in what is called the Cabot Project came upon a set of 514-year-old Italian ledgers that Dr. Ruddock had found decades earlier but which had disappeared from view. They showed that in the spring of 1496, Cabot received seed money for his voyages from the London branch of a Florentine banking house called the Bardi.
The explorer was long thought to have been financed by merchants in Bristol. But the new findings, published this spring in the journal Historical Research, demonstrate that he was staked at least in part by the same Italian financiers who helped his illustrious contemporaries like Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias and, of course, Columbus.
“The entries are tremendously important, because in one step they bring the Cabot voyages into line with the others,” said the project’s leader, Evan T. Jones, a maritime historian at the University of Bristol. “Italian merchant capital was very important to all of them.”
Just as important, he said, the ledgers provide the most convincing proof for Dr. Ruddock’s claim that she found about 25 Cabot documents never before seen by modern scholars. “She wasn’t making anything up,” Dr. Jones said.
His own detective work began nearly seven years ago, shortly after he read Dr. Ruddock’s obituary in The Guardian. Her decision to have her papers destroyed “left me shocked and sickened,” he said. “I decided to find out if there was any wiggle room.”
There was. Dr. Ruddock had had a book contract with the University of Exeter Press. They had no manuscript, the editors told him, but there was a file of correspondence. He was welcome to inspect it.
It contained a 1992 book proposal in which Dr. Ruddock outlined an incredible tale, largely untold. The proposal was both deliberately vague, masking sources from colleagues and competitors, and deliberately provocative, promising important new revelations.
In 2007, Dr. Jones analyzed the proposal in an article in Historical Research. Dr. Ruddock had described how Cabot, long thought to be a penniless drifter, was closely connected with London’s influential Italian émigré community. He enlisted the help of a papal diplomat, Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, to wangle a charter from Henry VII.
Her most tantalizing assertions concerned the third voyage, in 1498, about which nothing is known. She claimed that Cabot had not disappeared.
Instead, her proposal said, Cabot left Bristol with five ships carrying Italian friars, including Carbonariis, intent on establishing a mission in the North Atlantic lands that he had visited the previous year.
The friars disembarked on the Newfoundland coast, Dr. Ruddock said, to build a church and establish a religious colony. This momentous new information, if true, meant that Cabot and Carbonariis had founded the first European Christian settlement in North America.
And Cabot did not vanish. Instead, he sailed south along the North American coast, claiming everything he saw for the British Crown. According to Dr. Ruddock, he was the first European to see what is today the United States.
Dr. Ruddock said in her outline that Cabot finally reached the coast of South America, where he ran into one of Columbus’s captains, probably Alonso de Ojeda, who warned him off. The Caribbean was a Spanish pond at the time, and Henry VII was trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella to marry their daughter to his son, the Prince of Wales.
Cabot turned back and reached Newfoundland in early 1500, Dr. Ruddock said, then returned to Bristol, where he died four months after his arrival.
While all of this is plausible, much of it is not yet documented. Yet the Cabot Project — with a big assist from serendipity — has filled in many of Dr. Ruddock’s blank spaces, and her assertions have proved out so far.
In 2010, a colleague told Dr. Jones that he had made a lucky find on Amazon: Dr. Ruddock’s personal copy of the seminal work on Cabot, James A. Williamson’s “The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII,” published in 1962.
Dr. Jones traced the seller, Lisa Shanley, who had bought Dr. Ruddock’s modest house in Hampshire and was selling off the contents of its library. She was aware of the Ruddock story and invited Dr. Jones and his colleague Margaret Condon for a visit.
Dr. Ruddock’s study was still intact — including a shoe cupboard she had used for documents, the sticky labels still affixed to its pigeonholes. One of them read, “The Bardi firm, of London.”
“We knew from Ruddock’s notes that an Italian banker had supported the voyage, but didn’t know which one,” Dr. Jones said. Now they did. He got in touch with Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, an economic historian of the late Middle Ages who had already scouted family archives in Florence looking for Dr. Ruddock’s sources without success. Now, given the Bardi name, he was able to find company records in the archives of the Guicciardini, another prominent Florentine family. (The curator, a Guicciardini family member, was too young to remember Dr. Ruddock.)
“There was a reading room and a big back room with the shelves neatly organized,” Dr. Guidi-Bruscoli said. Bardi’s London office periodically sent its ledgers home, and each book had a title and a date. Dr. Guidi-Bruscoli opened the relevant ledger and there it was:
“John Cabot, of Venice, on 27 April [1496], is debited for 10 pounds sterling, paid in cash ... so that he could go and find the new land.” A second entry recorded an additional payment of 6 pounds, 13 shillings and 4 pence.
There is no obvious reason the Bardi Company would give even a paltry 16 pounds — enough for a month at sea — to somebody like Cabot, but “my best guess,” Dr. Jones said, is that the bank was trying to curry favor with Carbonariis, whose diplomatic duties included collecting taxes for the Vatican and using the Italian banks to send it to Rome.
“He’s somebody you really want to keep sweet, if you’re a banker,” Dr. Jones said. “My guess is that he liked Cabot and steered the Bardi to him. The Bardi jumped on it, because the friar could do other great things for them.”
To Advance, Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself.
But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.
Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.
In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.
To show how scientists depend on ignorance, Dr. Firestein has written a short, highly entertaining book aimed at nonscientists and students who want to be scientists.
The book comes at an important time. Today’s most vociferous scientific controversies turn on different interpretations of facts — about climate change, about contraception, about evolution. When politics are injected, the shouting grows louder, the thinking muddier. Uncertainty is a dirty word.
Dr. Firestein, by contrast, celebrates a tolerance for uncertainty, the pleasures of scientific mystery and the cultivation of doubt. If more people embraced the seductive appeal of uncertainty, he says, it might take some acrimony out of our public debates.
Dr. Firestein got the idea for his book by teaching a course on cellular and molecular neuroscience, based on a 1,414-page textbook that, at 7.7 pounds, weighs more than twice as much as a human brain. He eventually realized that his students must think that pretty much everything in neuroscience is known. “This could not be more wrong,” he writes. “I had, by teaching this course diligently, given the students the idea that science is an accumulation of facts.
“When I sit down with colleagues over a beer at a meeting, we don’t go over facts,” Dr. Firestein writes. “We don’t talk about what’s known. We talk about what we’d like to figure out, about what needs to be done.”
He realized he was failing to teach ignorance, the most critical part of the scientific enterprise, which led to the creation of a course titled “SNC3429 Ignorance.”Dr. Firestein likes to tease students in the class about what kind of grade they want: Is it better to get an A or an F in ignorance?
In his book, Dr. Firestein writes that conducting science is something like searching for a black cat in a dark room — very difficult, especially when, as is often the case, it turns out there is no cat.
To explore scientific groping in the dark, Dr. Firestein invites university colleagues from various disciplines to talk to his students about what they don’t know.
“They come and tell us about what they would like to know, what they think is critical to know, how they might get to know it, what will happen if they do find this or that thing out, what might happen if they don’t, about what they didn’t know 10 or 20 years ago and know now, or still don’t know,” he writes. “They talk about the current state of their ignorance.”
Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist at Hunter College and the City University of New York and Dr. Firestein’s wife, studies the minds of animals. She wonders if there is a smooth progression of mental function as animals become more evolved, or if there is a mysterious discontinuity that separates human consciousness from whatever is experienced by other animals.
The problem is that “mind” tends to be circularly defined as something that only humans have. According to Dr. Reiss, this definition is useless. It creates ignorance in the wrong way — by appearing to mean something when it means nothing.
“Why do we think animals don’t think?” she said. “We begin with a negative starting assumption and then must prove that they do.”
In exploring animal minds, Dr. Reiss does the opposite: She assumes that they can think and patiently gives them opportunities to demonstrate their abilities. To gasps of surprise, she has shown that dolphins and elephants, like humans and chimpanzees, can recognize themselves in a mirror.
These experiments do not answer questions so much as raise more of them, Dr. Firestein notes. “And questions are more relevant than answers,” he adds.
But not all ignorance is valuable, of course. “It has to be really good ignorance, the kind that leads to ever deeper questions,” Dr. Firestein said. “This might make nonscientists more interested in what scientists do — we’re all ignorant together.”
To get a feel for how scientists really think, he offered this advice: Next time you meet a scientist — at a dinner party, at your child’s school, just by chance — don’t ask her to explain what she does. Ask her what she’s trying to figure out.
