I also got to check out some older issues of Mothering magazine, which got me pretty excited. I can’t wait to sit and read them. A magazine that actually contains ads for things like cloth diapers and has cover stories such as “Best natural toys of 2007″ (I told you the issues were a little old) and “What Holland can teach us about birth” and “Culinary adventures for Toddlers” sounds right up my alley. Whee!

Anyway, the book is just informative and gives a lot of background information on the diseases, the vaccines themselves, why they’re good, and why some people choose not to receive them. What has intrigued me so much is that for each vaccine he goes through how they’re made and the ingredients that are in the final solution. A lot of bacteria/viruses for use in vaccines are grown and incubated in monkey kidney cells, chicken embryos, etc. So the final solutions end up with small amounts of cow blood proteins, human cell proteins, cow fetus serum, and stuff like that. The craziest is for the Japanese encephalitis vaccine, where it is “made by infecting the brains of mice, then extracting and liquefying the brains”. That’s really gross. Of course, no one gets that vaccine unless you’re doing some extensive travel, so it’s just more interesting than anything.

Something about the concept of injecting oneself with animal parts just seems… yucky. But then again, is that any different than eating various animals? Probably not, and considering the amount of meat (and therefore blood of the animals and stuff) that we eat, the teeny amount that remains from the process of making vaccines is pretty negligible. Actually, the more it’s making me think about it, the more I think maybe I really should stop eating meat.

I don’t know what I previously thought happened in the process of making vaccines, but it has been very interesting to me to learn about it all. Sometimes there are little things that make you realize just how complicated the world is… for example, writing this post and publishing it is all rather simple for me, but it takes the internet, all the working parts of a computer, the hosting, the design to let me input words, and so much other stuff just for it to work… like electricity that magically is connected to my home and I don’t even think twice about it. The world is a lot more intricate than I generally realize.

Fast forward a few years (ahem… I am failing to give the specific year not because it makes me feel old but because I don’t like drawing attention to what I feel is my relative youngness. I think people don’t take me seriously sometimes because they think I’m young) . Today, there’s a huge backlash against Wall Street and stockbrokers and we’ve taken a sudden economic downturn to put it lightly. And what have I noticed? Little references are popping up all over to the Sherman McCoys of Wall Street (this was just casually mentioned in a New York Times article this morning) and to Tom Wolfe’s writing. I feel smart every time I catch the reference.

Did my high school English teacher know we’d face this? He focused a lot on literary allusions. We had a massive project relating to biblical and mythological allusions that I still use because it does in fact help me understand references in news articles or books. So it’s fitting that the book I was so annoyed with now helps me catch nuances in articles about current events.

Perhaps he was just trying to warn us, his little class of A.P. seniors–especially when I think about Dr. Faustus as well–about the dangers of allowing our hubris to destroy us as we went out into the world. Either way, I’m learning to soften my view of the whole thing, and I like him even more. You see, anything would have been an improvement over junior English, where the standout of that year was Grapes of Wrath. Ug. I really hope the economy doesn’t get to the point where I find some twisted appreciation for reading THAT once upon a time.