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Poseidon was god of the sea, earthquakes, storms, and horses and is considered one of the most bad-tempered, moody and greedy Olympian gods. He was known to be vengeful when insulted. Reference
This doesn't have anything to do with the debate over the efficacy of the drug hydroxychloroquine.
Aside from the fact that this doctor sports long hair like Dr. Harold Bornstein, I was struck by the large painting in the photo of the doctor who conducted the hydroxychloroquine study touted by Trump photo which Politico used to illustrate this story.
PARIS — Sitting behind his desk in a hospital in the southern French city of Marseille, Didier Raoult has convinced thousands, including the U.S. president, that a common antimalarial drug can save people infected by Covid-19.
In a few short weeks, the controversial microbiologist has become France’s best-known doctor after announcing the coronavirus “endgame” on Youtube.
He is also a ticking time bomb for the government and health authorities, as his supporters and some high-profile politicians challenge official policy on battling the coronavirus.
A close look at the painting shows that there is a caduceus in the lower left and some kind of bird wearing a hat just behind the Poseiden’s arm.
UPDATE: Thanks to Red Dan, Greenbird, and Robertbre for determining what the bird in the hat symbolized. It is the plague doctor!
They have solved the mystery. The reason Dr. Didier Raoult likes the painting may have nothing to do with Poseidon! Of course, he may also admire Poseidon:
A few facts about Poseidon (reference)
- Poseidon was most notably the God of the sea and the protector of all waters; sailors relied upon him for safe passage.
- Poseidon was worshipped as a fertility god.
- Poseidon was moody by nature: his temperament was unstable at best, and his emotional fluctuations often resulted in violence.
- He was similar to Zeus in that he liked to exert power over women and flaunt his rugged masculinity.
- One of his most notable dalliances involved his sister Demeter. She refused his advances by turning herself into a mare. He then transformed into a stallion and pursued her. Their relations produced a horse, Arion.
I couldn’t find the painting in an extensive Internet search. I couldn’t find anything in my reading about Poseidon that related to the mythology about him and medicine which brings up the question as to why the artist included the caduceus in the painting. The artist may have included it not as a reference to medicine but to the god Hermes for whom this is also a symbol. However, I can find no connection between Hermes and Poseidon. Hermes’ main symbol is the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two snakes copulating and carvings of the other gods.
I have had no idea what the bird in the hat symbolizes.
I can’t quite make out exactly what the writing on the painting says although the word “monument” and “Neptune” (the Roman counterpart of the Greek god Poseidon) seems to be there.
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All I came up with is that there is an organization called Poseidon Sciences. They do research related to the ocean. I contacted them to see if perhaps they sold it at a conference and they got right back to me to let me know they had never seen this painting before.
The minor mystery remained unsolved until several commenters with knowledge of art enlightened me.
Tuesday, Apr 7, 2020 · 4:36:08 PM +00:00
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HalBrown
This article has two parts. One is quite technical and addresses the study itself. The second is the author’s mostly negative opinion of Dr. Raoult.
Excerpts from the sections on Dr. Raoul:
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That takes us to Dr. Raoul’s other published work. For extended comment on this I refer the reader to this post by Leonid Schneider at For Better Science. To summarize, there are a number of papers published from his lab over the years that have some of the better-known publication sins: duplication of photomicrographs, photoshopped blots. One of these in 2006 was egregious enough that Raoult and several of his co-authors were banned from publishing in any ASM (American Society for Microbiology) journals for a year. He was angry enough about this that he has almost never published in an ASM journal since the incident.
I am a believer in the maxim that you should never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. When you see these sorts of things in a publication, it can be outright fabrication, or corner-cutting (not permissible either, of course), or sheer disorganization and sloppiness (which also not should be the case). Raoult publishes a lot of papers (hundreds of them), and I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised that there’s some junk in there. I don’t think he rises to the level of some serial fraudster. But neither does this stuff build confidence.
It’s also interesting to take a look at his earlier reactions to this very epidemic. In this YouTube video from January 21st, he takes a rather dismissive tone (translation from a transcript here, in a long article (in French) at Les Crises that serves as an excellent source of background on Dr. Raoult in general):
But he is a man of strong opinions. Update: see this profile in Science from 2016 for more of these. Unfortunately, he has also seen fit to share them in a quickly written book, Épidémies: Vrais Dangers et Fausse Alerts (Epidemics: Real Dangers and False Alarms), which comes complete with a large photograph of Dr. Roualt on the cover. It is hard not to find this unseemly in the current situation, and if there is a provision for the profits to be donated to charity, then I have missed it. You might take away from all this that a large ego is at work, and the Inspector General of Social Affairs of the French government would agree with you on that point. A 2015 report on the management and structure of the IHU-Marseilles, Dr. Raoult’s institution, concluded that it was far too centralized on his decision-making and “entirely dominated” by him in both the administrative and scientific senses.
Raoult has, in fact, been the subject of a number of accusations of harassment over the years. The For Better Science post linked to above has more details, and if you read French or want to use Google Translate you can see quite a few of them here. There’s a lot of “Who told you you could speak up” and “You’re not paid to think” browbeating, complaints of shouting matches and arbitrary dismissals, etc., which do seem to fit what one gets of the man’s personality in his interviews. Update: Leonid Schneider has heard from someone who worked in Raoult’s institute, and who vividly describes the atmosphere there. Complaints of sexual harassment also boiled over in 2017 with at least six women involved. Allegations were made that another professor at IHU threatened a foreign graduate student and others with retribution if they came forward against him and made statements like “Don’t you know how to behave with white people?” after making sexual advances. Prof Raoult was accused of trying to minimize the affair in the department and of threatening to fire people who were making accusations. It is not comfortable reading. (Update: cleared up this section and added more details).
All in all, I am pretty sure that I don’t care for Didier Raoult very much. And I don’t care for his style of research nor for his ways of expressing himself. Now, it would be a more simple world if assholes were always wrong about things, and I am not yet prepared to say that Dr. Raoult is wrong about hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. But neither does he seem to be the sort of person who is always a reliable source, either. I do not take pleasure in this. But I am less hopeful about this work than I was when I first read about it, and I can only wonder what direction those hopes will take in the weeks to come.