January 2011

In 1943 I was a second-year medical student in Kansas City, enrolled in an accelerated program designed to finish the four-year course in three years. We had little or no time for recreation, but, thanks to a scheduling quirk, those in my section of the class suddenly found ourselves with two open weeks. I seized the opportunity to gain a bit of practical experience by accompanying some physician mentors on their rounds at a hospital back home in Wichita.

One of these doctors had admitted a patient with subacute bacterial endocarditis (an infection of the inside lining of the heart), who was doing very badly. Back then there was no treatment for this disease, and most hospitals had little to offer except supportive therapy: giving the patient fluids and trying to prevent bedsores.

It was March 1, 1932, a balmy day in Princeton, New Jersey. I was seventeen, a high school student preparing to enter the university, where my father was a professor of military science and tactics.

The telephone rang, and it was an administrator at Princeton, informing my father that Col. Charles Lindbergh had just called to say that his infant son had been kidnapped. Lindbergh had said that his house in nearby Hopewell was full of police and many other people and had asked if the university could lend him ten or twelve cots to accommodate some of them. The administrator had turned to my father for help because he thought that the ROTC program might have some extra cots. This was indeed the case, and my father promised to send them over right away.

Contact American Orient Express (call 877-854-3545 or visit www.americanorientexpress.com ) for information on upcoming trips. The company also runs American Spirit Rail Tours, which consists of daylight runs through the Pacific Northwest and the American Rockies (888-533-7245; www.americanspiritrail.com ). Rocky Mountaineer Railtours puts together packages that you can take before or after its two-day trip. It’ll arrange any number of permutations: a few days at the Chateau Lake Louise or at one of the many fine hotels in Banff (I stayed at the splendid Rimrock), plus sightseeing tours of the region (800-665-7245; www.rockymountaineer.com ).

Things are reportedly looking up for Amtrak, which plans to add some routes and upgrade service on existing ones. The Coast Starlight, one of its best and most popular trains, follows a route similar to that of the train I took. It doesn’t travel through the Feather River Canyon and certainly doesn’t take a week, but Bob Johnston, our onboard lecturer, called it “a lovely train.”

I was sitting in a club car rescued from America’s greatest passenger train, the Twentieth Century Limited, when I first heard the phrase "cruise train." It made sense. The train I was traveling—privately owned but open to anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare—offered fine meals, attentive service, tiny but richly furnished sleeping compartments, a program of escorted bus tours to nearby sights, and onboard lectures. The concept certainly owed as much to the cruise industry as to present-day railroading, but its roots go back to a lavish style of rail travel that disappeared just before the living memory of most of my fellow passengers. So they and I were aboard American Orient Express’s new-old train, on an excursion entitled Pacific Coast Explorer, attempting to relive an era about as distant as that of the transatlantic ocean liner.

By the time you read this, the race to decode the entire human genome—transcribing the DNA that makes us what we are—will be over. The race has been a two-way contest between the Human Genome Project, a public consortium coordinated by the U.S. government, and the Celera Corporation, a private business, and its finish will complete one of the great breakthroughs in human scientific knowledge. As the race has progressed, hundreds of patents have been awarded, and thousands more applied for, on human genes, the essential units of information in the genome.

How can this be? How did we get from a patent as protection for an invention like a cotton gin or a steam engine to a patent as ownership, in effect, of the basic chemicals that keep us alive? You must know the answer to that question to understand the controversies over the patenting of genes.

As the stock market has bounced up and down this year, there has been much talk about the Old Economy and the New Economy. But the Old Economy, however temporarily unfashionable it may be on Wall Street, is still very much with us. Buildings are still made of steel and concrete. Oil and the internal-combustion engine still dominate transportation. You are probably reading this article by the light of an invention Thomas Edison first demonstrated in 1879.

And there are many parts of planet Earth that even the Old Economy has not yet reached, where the people still live in what we might call the old Old Economy. This is a system of subsistence agriculture and hand labor, of grinding poverty for the many and vast wealth for the few. That was the condition of the Western world 250 years ago, and the only way out of it is to do what the West did then: industrialize. An industrial economy creates wealth much faster than does a nonindustrial one, and if history is any guide, however rich those at the top of the economic ladder become, the rest of society becomes much richer as well.

“My ancestors fought for the question of who was supreme, the federal or the state government. They felt that South Carolina freely went into the Union and had the right to opt out, like an independent country.”

“Would you ask the Jewish community to accept a smaller swastika flag? This is the flag of treason against the United States government, and it should not be celebrated or put in any kind of prominent position.”

There, in a nutshell, is why the controversy over if and where and how high the Confederate battle flag should fly at South Carolina’s capitol has continued to elude a resolution acceptable to all of the state’s citizens. The first opinion comes from the state senator Glenn McConnell, a white Republican from Charleston; the second, from the state representative Fletcher N. Smith, a black Democrat from Greenville. But the central question —whether the flag should be honored as a testament to the courage of Confederate soldiers and Southern “heritage” or should be banished as a symbol of racism—has already flummoxed much more prominent national politicians.

I found your December 1999 issue fascinating. The pictures in “Seeing the Century,” whether scraps of paper or singular trapped moments of history, described narratives far beyond their scope as mere images.

I wanted to point out that the image for 1904, though technically by Frank Lloyd Wright in that it was created by his architectural practice, may be a watercolor by Marion Mahony, a talented associate of FLW who later founded her own highly acclaimed practice with her husband, Walter Burley Griffin.