The U.S. Patent Office had a problem shortly after the Civil War. Injuries like war wounds had catapulted the need for doctors and effective treatments. Medicine was becoming more scientific; but even though the country had a medical college as early as the eighteenth century, it had no thorough way of determining the efficacy of medical practices save by anecdote. When the Civil War brought to the public mind not only injury by weapons but also by disease as the causes of military losses, numerous people, including charlatans, plied various techniques and compounds to the injured and sick. Sometimes what they did worked, but they did not know exactly why. With disease, doctors faced a problem that extended beyond the battlefield in both time and space. Organic chemistry was in its infancy, and devices for analysis were crude at best. So, the Patent Office had a problem.
What if something worked as a cure, but no one knew exactly why it worked? Should the Office issue a patent? In 1867 S. H. Hodges, writing for the Board of Examiners, addressed the problem with respect to medicine to prevent and cure Swine Cholera. He wrote, “The applicant’s specific is composed of a number of medical articles [think chemical constituents], the nature of which is not important upon the present occasion, and it is unnecessary to enumerate them.”* In short, the question at hand was whether or not the inventor had to address the nature of each constituent’s contribution to a medicine’s effectiveness.
Hodges argued against needing justifications of the ingredients. Don’t fault him as you see from the perspective of “all things labeled.” All that mattered to Hodges was that the stuff worked. As he also said, “…there are remedies employed with success the effect of which the most intelligent are unable to account for.” Think whole, not part. If it worked, who cared how it worked?
Today, we have the ability to analyze the individual components of almost anything. That makes duplication and repetition easy. As a result, we’re used to seeing labels on supplements that claim “proprietary” proportions, indicating that some “scientific researcher in some lab somewhere figured out the most effective combinations of atoms and molecules to prevent, cure, or enhance whatever. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration demands identification and testing of each medicine’s chemical composition before it stamps “Approved.”
But do individual components matter in other aspects of life? Take teams (of any kind) for example. After a losing season, the general manager searches for that one player who can make a difference in the ensuing season. Just that key guy. And sometimes the strategy works. But then, sometimes it doesn’t. We could look for specific examples, such as the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, tracing both their failure, success, and failure largely based on their reacquisition of LeBron James, a truly great individual player. There are numerous other examples, of course, and if you follow some sports team, you probably have anecdotes about placing too much emphasis on a single constituent player. And just as Hodges knew that if a medicine worked, he could take its working as a sign that it was patentable, so we know that if a team wins, we can take the championship as an outcome of all the constituent players working somehow—probably inexplicably—in unison.
Sometimes we overanalyze when we should just accept that something works just because it works. No, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make improvements, but changes to things that work don’t always engender things that work better. We will, of course, continue to overanalyze, but that’s our general nature.
So, if you are in a relationship that’s working, don’t make an unnecessary acquisition for a special player. Change one component and you change the whole, sometimes for worse, sometimes with no effect, and sometimes, yes, for the better. But if you've already won a championship with constituents that work well together, Hodges, were he alive today, would probably grant your team a patent.
*Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26, December 28, 1867 online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8951/8951-h/8951-h.htm#24
What if something worked as a cure, but no one knew exactly why it worked? Should the Office issue a patent? In 1867 S. H. Hodges, writing for the Board of Examiners, addressed the problem with respect to medicine to prevent and cure Swine Cholera. He wrote, “The applicant’s specific is composed of a number of medical articles [think chemical constituents], the nature of which is not important upon the present occasion, and it is unnecessary to enumerate them.”* In short, the question at hand was whether or not the inventor had to address the nature of each constituent’s contribution to a medicine’s effectiveness.
Hodges argued against needing justifications of the ingredients. Don’t fault him as you see from the perspective of “all things labeled.” All that mattered to Hodges was that the stuff worked. As he also said, “…there are remedies employed with success the effect of which the most intelligent are unable to account for.” Think whole, not part. If it worked, who cared how it worked?
Today, we have the ability to analyze the individual components of almost anything. That makes duplication and repetition easy. As a result, we’re used to seeing labels on supplements that claim “proprietary” proportions, indicating that some “scientific researcher in some lab somewhere figured out the most effective combinations of atoms and molecules to prevent, cure, or enhance whatever. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration demands identification and testing of each medicine’s chemical composition before it stamps “Approved.”
But do individual components matter in other aspects of life? Take teams (of any kind) for example. After a losing season, the general manager searches for that one player who can make a difference in the ensuing season. Just that key guy. And sometimes the strategy works. But then, sometimes it doesn’t. We could look for specific examples, such as the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, tracing both their failure, success, and failure largely based on their reacquisition of LeBron James, a truly great individual player. There are numerous other examples, of course, and if you follow some sports team, you probably have anecdotes about placing too much emphasis on a single constituent player. And just as Hodges knew that if a medicine worked, he could take its working as a sign that it was patentable, so we know that if a team wins, we can take the championship as an outcome of all the constituent players working somehow—probably inexplicably—in unison.
Sometimes we overanalyze when we should just accept that something works just because it works. No, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make improvements, but changes to things that work don’t always engender things that work better. We will, of course, continue to overanalyze, but that’s our general nature.
So, if you are in a relationship that’s working, don’t make an unnecessary acquisition for a special player. Change one component and you change the whole, sometimes for worse, sometimes with no effect, and sometimes, yes, for the better. But if you've already won a championship with constituents that work well together, Hodges, were he alive today, would probably grant your team a patent.
*Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26, December 28, 1867 online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8951/8951-h/8951-h.htm#24
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