The author is Siddhartha Mukherjee and the subtitle is A Biography of Cancer. This is not a typical excerpt, but it works as an excerpt for this blog:
In 1942, when Merck had shipped out its first batch of penicillin — a mere five and a half grams of the drug — that amount had represented half of the entire stock of the antibiotic in America. A decade later, penicillin was being mass-produced so effectively that its price had sunk to four cents for a dose, one-eighth the cost of a half gallon of milk.
This book deserves its rave reviews; it is one of the best non-fiction works of the year.
Related to this topic, here is an update on Christopher Hitchens.
I find that writers are curiously fond of comparing things to the price of milk, but this is an awkward choice for a wide audience since milk prices are very different in different places (due in part, I suppose, to various distorting agricultural and consumer policies).
Certainly I am not used to thinking of a gallon of milk as costing sixty-four cents… I pay closer to four dollars.
Richard, that $0.64 per gallon of milk is the price in the 1950s, so you paying $4 isn't a matter of "different places".
I am curious, though, why milk is often used as a comparison. Is it just that it's a liquid used widely around the world? Does its price not vary much from place to place?
In other words, what does the price of milk have to do with the price of tea in China?
Another great book on cancer:
http://www.amazon.com/Living-Downstream-Ecologist…
Milk is used because basic food commodities, while variable, give a pretty good approximation of the cost of living. Economists would measure this as the purchasing power adjusted price of goods. A loaf of bread is also therefore a common comparative, although there is much more variation in the price of bread (due to more varietals and quality strata) than the price of cow milk .
Is it just me or there something spooky about this Christopher Hitchens deathwatch? We're all dying here. Is the point that that media sponge can't even die with a modicum of grace? Or that nobody can stand to let him? Why not drop him in Haiti? Let's put his life in perspective.
Careless:
It's hard to come up with a worldwide basic food commodity. The closest I could come up with is something like rice or flour but even that is regional. Being an American (and the Midwest type), I had rice maybe once in twenty years
Milk is a pretty good basic staple though for the target audience of this book.
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