50 Years ago

In his first lecture, Prof. Medawar had emphasized the fallibility and limitations of our efforts to predict the future. Nevertheless, he maintained in his second lecture that it is not true to say that advances in medicine and hygiene must cause a genetical deterioration of mankind; there is more to be feared from a slow decline of human intelligence. But if that is happening, it is because the rather stupid are biologically fitter than those who are innately more intelligent, not because medicine is striving to raise the biological fitness of those people who might otherwise be hopelessly unfit ... Lord Adrian, too, emphasizes the need for much more information ... We have succeeded so well, he observes, in our aim at keeping alive every child that is born that we are certainly preserving many unfavourable genes which would otherwise have died out. “If we set out to save the unfit we must expect more unfitness in the world and more inheritance of the factors which promote it. Even if the radiation level remains as it now is, the advance of science can harm the genetic constitution of the race”.

From Nature 13 February 1960.

100 Years ago

It is now an evident fact that Paris has recently suffered the ravages of an inundation greater and more severe than any which have visited the city within the last two and a half centuries. A gauge at the bridge of La Tournelle shows the surface of the water as having reached a height above the bed of the river of 27 feet 10½ inches. Normally, it is only about 8 or 9 feet, and it is necessary to go back so far as the year 1658 in order to find any record exceeding, or even approaching, this figure. At that date the height attained was 28 feet 10½ inches ... The causes of the flood are not quite so obvious as the effects.

From Nature 10 February 1910.