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(4) Mark Twain
Scores of writers have spent their whole lives trying to pen The Great American Novel. Twain may have done it several times. Adventures of Huck Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are still required reading, but Twain wasn’t just a writer and humorist. He also created a number of inventions, including a set of detachable garment straps, and befriended Nikola Tesla. Perhaps fellow genius contemporary Thomas Edison put it best: “An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.”
(12) Jonas Salk
You know what’s terrific? Not having polio! For that, we all owe Jonas Salk a big tip of our caps. From 1952 to 1953, a polio outbreak in the U.S. led to 93,000 new cases of the disease. In 1955, Salk’s ingenious vaccine, which used an inactivated form of poliovirus to help build antibodies against the disease, hit the market. By 1957, the number of new cases of polio in the U.S. had dropped to 5,600. By 1994, polio was completely eradicated in the Americas.
The Breakdown
Dr. Salk gets a huge tip of the cap for curing polio and helping advance vaccine science. Twain, though, deserves some acclaim for giving us some decent novels to read in high school English classes. Without Huck Finn, we’d all be stuck reading A Separate Peace over and over again, a fate that might not be worse than polio, but it’s close. How do you like your genius, scientific or literary? This should be a tight one.
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Comments (9)
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Such a hard decision… I will have to think it over and get back to you, ha.
posted by Sarah in CA on 3-24-2009 at 6:54 pm
Yeah, I would much rather have polio then read “A Separate Peace”
posted by Ellie on 3-24-2009 at 7:51 pm
Defeating polio is good, but in terms of genius, I have to take the complete body of work into account, which for me gives Twain a slight edge. If the tournament was about who has most benefited humanity, I’d go with Salk.
posted by Ryan on 3-24-2009 at 8:15 pm
Salk didn’t even patent the vaccine when he found it just so it would be even easier for everyone to get it cheaply and quickly. He could have made a ton off of that.
Genius move? Maybe not. Awesome display of character? For sure.
posted by Eric on 3-24-2009 at 9:25 pm
Wow, looks like everyone else is having as hard of a time choosing as I am. It’s at 50-50 right now. Either man is quite deserving.
posted by nutmeag on 3-24-2009 at 10:23 pm
50-50 and voting is closed? at 673 votes. I couldn’t until now and I would have totally chosen Twain.
posted by Johnny Cat on 3-24-2009 at 10:37 pm
Johnny Cat — None of these polls will be closed until Sunday night. If it won’t let you vote now, you might have to come back later.
(I swear this isn’t a secret plan to increase pageviews — it has to do with our increased voter fraud security. Making sure you can’t vote 2400 times is also making it harder to vote once. Elections are tough.)
posted by Jason English on 3-24-2009 at 10:56 pm
Thanks Jason, I voted now and it worked!
posted by Johnny Cat on 3-25-2009 at 1:15 am
This is one where I reversed my usual route and went with the artist, Twain. Salk did amazing things and was brilliant, but remember that Sabin also invented a polio vaccine. When the time was right, and someone else would’ve invented the same thing a couple of years later, that doesn’t compare to the fact that noone else would’ve ever written Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.
Recaptcha: respelling 10
posted by Dave on 3-25-2009 at 10:04 am