Thank you, Dear Readers, for responding so well to the Best Quips Competition. Our panel of judges will be sorely tested. It’s good to know that, in these hard times, some of you insist on keeping a sense of humor. You have one more week to submit entries.
My very first Shoebox entry paid homage to Enrico Fermi’s quip about nuclear energy in the summer of 1945: “It would be nice if it could cure the common cold.” Linus Pauling, the son of a druggist, did try to cure the common cold, proposing generous dosages of Vitamin C. Pauling won the Nobel Prize twice, first for Chemistry, then for campaigning to stop nuclear testing and to ban the Bomb.
In No More War! (1958), Pauling took particular aim at Edward Teller, a staunch advocate of nuclear testing. Pauling’s book tried to offer a science lesson on radiation effects and mutation to lay readers, and to rebut public claims by Teller, Willard F. Libby, and others that atmospheric testing did not pose a hazard to public health. One of their assertions was that radiation from a wristwatch with a luminous dial was ten times as great as from fallout. Their methodology was a bit dodgy. Teller, no slouch when it came to quips, asserted in a Life magazine piece published on February 10, 1958 that, “The worldwide fallout is as dangerous to human health as being one ounce overweight.”
Update, Nov. 24. Josh adds the following: Pauling’s immediate reply to Teller’s magazine piece is also worthy of note, calling various parts of the article “false,” “misleading,” “inaccurate,” and “pure propaganda.” The quippiest bit is this:
The whole article is an apology for evil, a plea for the continued use of force, an attack on the effort to introduce reason into world affairs.
The letters column also mentions that Teller and Pauling had held a televised debate on the subject — transcript available for $0.50 from KQED in San Francisco.