Malcolm Cutchins: Money devoted to microscope was money well spent for mankind

Former NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger died Memorial Day at 94. He was one of 126 scientists who came over to Huntsville with Werner von Braun at the end of World War II.
He once gave a very thought-provoking “Answer to a Nun in Africa,” who had raised the question, “Why do we spend money on space when we could use it to help poor people in Africa?”
As the clamor for wealth redistribution continues and strengthens today (usually using different and more socialistic arguments), the significance of a major theme of Dr. Stuhlinger’s “answer” is still true. He told of a Count who supported a man within his subjects who “tinkered with glass.” Some of the people who didn’t have much complained about this eccentric hobby; “Why not give us the money instead?” they whined.

But the Count insisted that something very important would come out of his work. Indeed it did: the microscope (and eventually the telescope). How much greater help the microscope has been to all mankind than to use the support instead on those who were poor and complaining!

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Another topic that has been in the news quite a bit lately is that the rate of suicides among our soldiers is up to 18.8 per 100,000. But on Fox Radio on May 29 and in a story on FOXnews.com,it is noted that 26 percent of those soldiers had never deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan. Also, “when civilian rates are adjusted to cover the same age and gender mix that exists in the Army, the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000.” Certainly, suicide is a serious problem among all of our young people, but could it be related to throwing God out the schoolhouse window?

Or could it be related to the bizarre division among our populace, a division that wrongly convinces our “soldier-heroes” that what they are doing is worthless? For example, I know a colonel whose dad was spit upon at the airport when he returned from Vietnam. Is it less hurtful now, that most of the “spitting” is with mean words?

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For all the talk of the United States being “in a recession,” according to financial expert Dave Ramsey (WANI, 1400 AM at 6 p.m. each night of the week), we are not. While certainly our economy has slowed, a recession is defined as two successive quarters when the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is negative. According to Ramsey, it hasn’t happened yet. Could it be that bad economic news fits the agenda of some of those pushing for the election of a Democratic presidential candidate?

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Much has been in the news lately about the outstanding 59- year-old neurosurgeon, Allan Friedman at Duke Medical Center, who just operated on the brain tumor of Sen. Ted Kennedy. It is interesting that the most outstanding spinal column doctor who was called in immediately after President John Kennedy was shot in Dallas was Dr. Hazouri who was practicing in Columbus, Ga., at the time. He was the one who quickly diagnosed (and removed) my first wife’s brain tumor in 1985. Unfortunately, Dr. Hazouri died of a heart attack at 65 in the operating room in the late 1990s and is no longer with us. I wonder, does socialized medicine produce any outstanding surgeons?

Dr. Malcolm Cutchins is an emeritus professor of engineering of Auburn University and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.