Consider your choice for party-list carefully (Sabong News)
Author
Sonny Coloma
Date
MARCH 31 2022
Celebrating one’s birthday could become a learning opportunity by imagining a History Channel episode that chronicles the milestones of one’s life journey.
If one born at this time in 1953 were to research newspaper archives, he would find out that the following were the significant global events of that year: US and North Korea sign armistice ending the Korean War; Joseph Stalin dies; Marshal Tito is elected president of Yugoslavia; Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain crowned; USSR explodes a hydrogen bomb; virologist Jonas Salk gives himself and his family the polio vaccine; British physicist Francis Crick and American biologist James Watson discover the double-helix structure of human DNA; and Edmund Hilary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal are the first to climb Mt. Everest.
Recalling Stalin’s death becomes significant as he is known as the author of Holodomor, or death by starvation in Ukraine. This period of famine in 1932 and 1933 resulted in three to six million lives lost.
According to a historical account: “Under the pretext of enforcing deliberately unrealistic grain-production quotas, Stalin’s enforcers seized farms across Ukraine in order to sell their products to the West. Before long, Soviet police began seizing not just grain, but anything edible.” Farmers were stopped from leaving their homeland, where Stalin intended them to starve, “but even in this unimaginable suffering, Ukrainians fought for their lives and each other.” A video clip narrator says “it was genocide carried out by a dictator who wanted to keep Ukraine under his control, and would do everything in his power to cover it up for decades.”
Would it be fair commentary to state that Russia’s current war on Ukraine initiated by Vladimir Putin is a case of history repeating itself?
Marshal Joseph Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1980 and is credited with having ensured the stability of the multi-ethnic republic during the Cold War period.
After his death, however, the political dynamics in Eastern Europe changed. Just as the former Soviet Union disintegrated into independent republics, Yugoslavia has since been transformed into six separate republics, namely: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
Queen Elizabeth still reigns as head of state in the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms. She has presided over a memorial service for her recently deceased husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. The United Kingdom has dissociated itself from the European Union but continues to project itself as “an extensive global soft power” as it maintains a “formidable military”, holds a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, and is one of nine nuclear powers in the world.
Jonas Salk was an American virologist who along with compatriot Albert Sabin conducted extensive research and experimentation on both live attenuated polio vaccines and formaldehyde-killed polio vaccines in monkeys. Dr. Salk’s killed vaccine, “with proper filtration of the biological culture was found to be effective” and was the first polio vaccine to receive US government approval in 1953. In 1961, the Sabin live vaccine was recommended to replace it.
The discovery of the polio vaccine took decades after the initial outbreak of the polio epidemic in the US in 1894. In contrast, vaccines against the novel coronavirus were discovered and authorized within a year of its initial outbreak in Wuhan, China.
Advancement in the study of human DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that marked a major breakthrough in 1953 is important as it has “helped revolutionize the investigation of disease pathways, assess an individual’s genetic susceptibility to specific diseases, diagnose genetic disorders, and formulate new drugs” especially against cancer and Covid-19.
According to Clinical Chemistry, “cancer patients have tumor-derived DNA fragments and the discovery of these fragments has proven to be of value in assessing the spread and recurrence of cancer. The Journal of Microbiology, Immunology and Infection reported in 2020: “Epidemiology of Covid-19 can also be understood using DNA, particularly in the analysis of susceptible individuals. Successful viral entry and replication depend on the interaction of SARS-CoV-2 and the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 or ACE2. Studies show that ACE2 gene polymorphism has an effect on the severity of Covid-19. It also has implications in individual susceptibility to the disease.”
Wikipedia cites the following important Philippine milestones of that year: Ramon Magsaysay is sworn in as President of the Philippines; DZAQ-TV 3 of Alto Broadcasting System (or ABS in ABS-CBN) makes its initial telecast, becoming Asia’s first commercial television broadcaster.
Recalling the establishment of the first commercial television broadcasting company launched by ABS-CBN reminds us of its unceremonious demise when the House of Representatives opted not to extend its congressional franchise that expired in 2020.
A new president will be elected in less than 40 days. Will the elected leader be as popular and well-loved as the late President Ramon Magsaysay whose administration was regarded as “one of the cleanest and most corruption-free” in modern Philippine history?
