Rotary and Polio

I had the opportunity to speak at another Rotary Club luncheon last Thursday, this one in Tunkhannock. Rotary Clubs have been quite gracious in extending invitations for me to speak because 1) they need a speaker once a week and I'm local and cheap (the cost of a lunch); and 2) because the main character in Risking Exposure contracts polio, I include some information about polio in my presentation.

So what, you may ask, does Rotary have to do with polio? Plenty, it turns out.

In the early 1950s, over 16,000 paralytic polio cases and 1800 deaths from polio were reported each year in the US alone. After the vaccine was introduced in the US in 1955, incidence declined sharply - less than 1000 cases in 1962 and below 100 cases per year after that.

Rotary International has taken this success to the rest of the world, becoming involved in the worldwide fight against polio since 1979. In the late 1980's, Rotary's End Polio Now campaign joined forces with the World Health Organization, the CDC, Unicef, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to purchase and distribute vaccines. By 2014, only 3 countries (Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan) remain polio-endemic, down from more than 125 countries in 1988. A truly remarkable achievement.

Rotary is committed to eradicating polio in our lifetime. I'm proud to support them however I can. And I'm honored to be their guest speaker whenever my schedule allows.

Choices

Michael and I saw The Imitation Game last weekend, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly. Like so many other movies and books I find intriguing, it is set during the WWII era but not on the battle front. It's the true story of British mathematician Alan Turing who worked at Bletchley Park trying to crack the Enigma code. For those unfamiliar, the Germans had created the Enigma machine, a complex typewriter-looking contraption designed to encrypt messages. Virtually all Nazi communications were sent by these encrypted messages, and many messages were intercepted by the Allies. Day after day, teams of code specialists and German language experts poured over the messages with pencil in hand, to no avail.

Without a way to break the code, the intercepted messages were gibberish. And the man-hours spent trying to decipher the code was pointless within 18 hours - the Germans changed the settings on their Enigma machine each night at midnight.

And the war was not going well. The Allies were weakening.

Enter some of the most brilliant minds of England. Alan Turing and his team built a machine that could work through millions of variables in a fraction of the time it took people with pencil and paper. The machine is essentially the world's first computer. It did the impossible - it cracked the Enigma code.

If this were a Disney movie, that would be the end. Code cracked, messages broken. Nazis lose, Allies win. Black and white.

But what actually happened next is fascinating. Turing realized immediately that the team couldn't break every message intercepted that day. If they did and acted upon that information, the Nazis would know the code had been broken. Turing knew the Nazis probably had another encryption machine ready to go in Enigma's place. So, the team made the heartbreaking decision to only share a few of the decoded messages at a time. Plus, they shared them only with a trusted connection, not with the military attache who expected all of them. 

Tough choices in tough times. Turing and his colleagues lived with the consequences of those choices, hearing about attacks they might have stopped but didn't, lives lost, ships sunk, planes downed. But the overall effect of their decision was right - look how the war turned out.

The more I read...

...the more I realize just how much I don't know.

This morning, I finished "The Girls of the Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II" by Denise Kiernan. This fascinating book focuses on the real-life activities of nine women who worked at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1940s. The women were employed because of their particular skills - secretaries, a statistician-mathematician, a janitor, a chemist, a pipe inspector, two machine operators, and a nurse. Later revealed to be one of the main manufacturing sites for the Manhattan Project, none of the employees at the time knew exactly what the plant made - they just knew that it was part of the war effort. None of them saw the whole operation, and each employee signed a pledge of secrecy (and were reminded repeatedly) regarding how vital their silence was regarding the small bits of information they did know. Folks who talked about their job to other employees or to townsfolk were immediately dismissed. Somehow, the secret held. Amazing.

Even more incredible to me was the way these women were recruited.They were approached individually, usually by a boss, an acquaintance, or a military official, and asked if they would like to be part of a special project to help the war effort. Their new job would require that they leave their current work and home setting. They would board a train and travel to an undisclosed location, live in an unnamed town for an uncertain amount of time, perform tasks that must remain secret, and never speak to anyone about what they did all day long, not even their own family or spouse. The work would be steady and the pay terrific. Everything would be arranged for them. All they had to do was say yes.

And they did. Eventually, tens of thousands of women with an adventurous spirit and a desire to work for a quick end to the war leaped into these jobs. Makes me wonder how many of us today would leave the comforts of home for such a big unknown.

I never heard of Oak Ridge Tennessee or the contribution of these women until I read this book. Thank you to Denise Kiernan for shedding light on these women's personal experiences and on those of the dozens of other women mentioned, but not closely followed, in the book.