Post
by JohnD » Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:18 pm
Mars seems to stimulate punning.
'Outpost Mars', a little known novel by "Cyril Judd" a pseudonym for CM Kornbluth and Judith Merrill, is almost a Western, of prairie homesteaders battling not against fire, flood and 'injuns', but against a hostile planet. There is even an honest and forthright community leader, a doctor, who carries the Day and wins the Girl, who would have been played in the movie by Gary Cooper or James Stewart. To be honest, the novel is not very good, either as SF or as a Western. What fascinated me was the major sub-plot, of conniving capitalists and politicians, who conspire in illicit traffic in an addictive drug, that can only be produced on Mars. That drug is called marcaine.
"Marcain" is the registered name of a very widely used local anaesthetic, bupivacaine, synthesised by Astra in the 60's. Unfortunately for parallel world or conspiracy theorists, in this Mars, marcaine is clearly an opiate, rather than a local anaesthetic. Equally unfortunately, Kornbluth died in 1958 only a few years after co-writing these stories, while Judith Merrill survived only to die last year, so we can’t ask them if they had shares in Astra. But I've asked one of the original investigators, Dr.Bertil Widman who was one of the first experimenters with and clinical users of Marcaine at its introduction in 1963. He replied, “I knew most of the people at Nobel Bofors-Pharma in Mölndal, Sweden who were involved in the development of Marcaine (project name LAC-43). Back then I asked the Bofors people the same question, about naming Marcaine, and they told me that the “Mar-“ prefix had no special meaning or relation to any person. Together with the marketing people the researchers tested several suggested names for one that would be easy to use in several languages, and finally found that “Marcaine” seemed to be the best, and of course all local anaesthetics should end in "-caine".”
To Kornbluth and Merrill it must have been obvious, if cheesy, to suffixed 'mar' to the ending 'caine' for US readers who in the 50's were familiar with confused media headlines that conflated mariauana and cocaine, in "Reefer Madness" and "Cocaine Fiends". We'll never know if Astra's marketing people were SF readers but I suspect at least one was!
Of course this could be another manifestation of “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” but that is another story, by another author, Isaac Asimov this time.
JOhn
A Mars Panorama from the Phoenix Lander
No thanks, I'll pass.
