Abstract
The year 1963 saw the essence of speed and power on the first Saturday in May as the horse Chateaugay won the Kentucky Derby on the track. That summer, the release of Jason and the Argonauts featured the ground-breaking work of the father of stop-motion, Ray Harryhausen on the screen. Last but certainly not least, November brought tragedy as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while in his motorcade on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas.
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- 1.
An -oid originates from Latinized form of Greek oeides, from eidos “form,” related to idein “to see”, eidenai “to know” literally “to see,” from PIE *weid-es-, from root *weid- “to see, to know”.
- 2.
An interesting note, the primary function of the hyoid bone, as an irregular bone, is to serve as an anchoring structure for the tongue. The bone is situated at the root of the tongue in the front of the neck and between the lower jaw and the largest cartilage of the larynx, or voice box. In forensic chemistry, if during an autopsy a corpse is discovered to possess a broken hyoid it can be surmised that strangulation was a possible cause of death.
- 3.
Tabloids have a deep connection to the laboratory and pharmaceuticals. Sir Henry Wellcome was such an excellent salesman in Britain that he wanted to create a brand around the name tabloid because it was connected to alkaloids which were, as this study will examine in Sect. 1.2, so integral to the development of opiates and opioids. He expanded the name beyond just tablets by producing everything from teas to medicine chests that famous explorers could take on their expeditions. Of course, tabloids as a term eventually became so enmeshed in the lexicon that eventually a judge ruled that Burroughs Wellcome could no longer trademark the term. Today, it is associated primarily with newspapers and magazines that sensationalize everything from the Kardashians to Bigfoot sightings.
- 4.
See Wintroub M (2017) The voyage of thought: navigating knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century world. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 17, 23–24; A heterotopia also exists in medicine, for instance, when a particular tissue type is located at a non-physiological site, but also coexists with the original tissue in its correct anatomical location. Even more fascinating is that heterotopias exist within the brain and are often divided into three groups: subependymal heterotopia, focal cortical heterotopia, and band heterotopia. Thus, we can use our heterotopias to think about heterotopias in cultures and societies!
- 5.
Benedict Anderson in his oft-cited work, Imagined Communities [6], uses the phrase sui generis, which translates to “unique in every way possible,” to describe the construction techniques used in building nations. Since, the laboratory was an extension of the state that at times provided funding it has an appropriate assignation here.
- 6.
Latour and Woolgar were not the first progenitors of the STS scholarship. That started in the 1960s with the publishing of Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which examined the underlying intellectual shifts behind the rise of European innovations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking cues from historians of science that were now joined in departments at universities by philosophy professors, STS was built on examining technology in its social and historical context. These historians guffawed at technological determinism, a doctrine that promoted mindlessness by the public through acceptance of an Orwellian world. At the same time, others began to develop similar contextual approaches to medical history. Since then, the movement has added juried journals, conferences, and a host of other outlets including the development of subfields like Tecnoscience and Tecnosocial.
- 7.
All sorts of articles and news agencies are reporting numbers and forecasting death rates. Sources need to be scrutinized in order to draw the proper conclusions. The fact of the matter is no one really knows moving forward what will occur. One of the more compelling charts we found was The Opioid Epidemic (2017), produced by Andy Brunning in collaboration with Chemical and Engineering News. Brunning’s website, http://www.compoundchem.com/ is also an interesting visual source concerning chemical compounds.
- 8.
An example of a recent article in the Washington Post’s section entitled, Retropolis, that attempts to link the past with the present is a piece by journalist Nick Miroff. For the record, he makes no mention of the role of the chemistry laboratory in the development of opioids.
- 9.
We want to acknowledge that interpreting events of the recent past is in our estimation to be fraught with peril. In a sense, releasing interpretations over-time, like our subjects, does have its benefits. Thus, getting away lends perspective. Though time does not necessarily heal all wounds; it does offer panoramic views of the currents of the past. One of the many benefits of the study of World History, espoused by the historian Jerry Bentley, presents these types of opportunities in which larger expanses of events can change the ways in which people view current events from history.
- 10.
If you are interested in reading about the recent sociological and personal impact of opioids you might consult the popular work of Sam Quinones in Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (2015) or J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016). The non-profit efforts of S.A.F.E. (Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic) are also attempting to prosecute this crisis, www.safeproject.us.
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Campbell, J.N., Rooney, S.M. (2018). Introduction: Chemical Heterotopias. In: A Time-Release History of the Opioid Epidemic. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91788-7_1
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