The Great Influenza John Barry Analysis

The passage from John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza explores the significance of certainty and uncertainty to scientific experimentation and research. The author’s employment of metaphor, repetition, and semantic inversion helps to reinforce the claim that, “to be a scientist requires not only intelligence and curiosity, but passion, patience, creativity, self-sufficiency, and courage”.
Barry opens the passage with two back-to-back examples of anaphora; these examples of repetition lay a direct emphasis on the strengths that certainty creates, along with the weaknesses that uncertainty creates. According to the author, “certainty gives one something upon which to lean” and “uncertainty makes one tentative if not fearful, and tentative steps, even when in the right direction, may not overcome significant obstacles”. This take on the abstractions of certainty and uncertainty can be applied to the decisions that we make on a daily basis, such as taking a less familiar route to work due to a traffic delay. Although

Similarly to how the pioneers once undertook the task to expand colonial America into the uncharted, unknown western territory, scientists “move deep into a wilderness region where they know almost nothing, where the very tools and techniques needed to clear the wilderness, to bring order to it, do not exist”. The uncertainty of what lay beyond civilization, of what the foreign region rendered, had been undermined with the idea of fulfilling the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Likewise, the pursuit of an extension of knowledge and understanding of what is unknown and a cultivation of scientific resources draws scientists forward. The comparison between these two entities serves the purpose to reiterate Barry’s opening paragraph statement; obstacles and breakthroughs cannot be possible if not for the courage to accept our innermost