Darwin's Suffering
There was a very moving piece on Charles Darwin by author, journalist, and Pulitzer winner John Darnton in Monday's LA Times:

Some years back, I was given a tour of Down House, Charles Darwin's country estate, and allowed to sit in the special chair in which he wrote "The Origin of Species" and other revolutionary works. The chair was one he had devised himself: High-backed, stuffed with horsehair, it had casters attached so that he could scoot around his study to reach his books, his working table and his microscope. He had fashioned a cloth-covered board to fit over the arms as a writing surface.

Once ensconced there, with the board lowered in place, I felt an indescribable thrill, like a child settling into the swing at a country fair when the bar descends to lock him in place. What a giddy ride Mr. Darwin has given us!

But I was equally intrigued by what I was shown next. The curator guided me to a nearby corner and pushed aside a curtain. Behind it Darwin had constructed a makeshift lavatory — a porcelain washbasin set inside the raised floor. It was, the curator explained, a crude vomitory. Often during his morning writing, sometimes more than once, Darwin's stomach would seize up. He would thrust aside his writing board, rush over and retch into the basin.

We tend to forget what a rough time Darwin had in his own day. He became a chronic invalid with multiple maladies so confusing that most biographers believe they must have been psychological in origin. After five years of romantic adventures sailing around the world on the Beagle, digging up fossils in South America and riding with the gauchos through hostile territory, he returned to England and immured himself in a quiet village in Kent. He turned pathologically shy in front of groups, so much so that he did not attend any of the historic debates over his theory of natural selection. And he was a world-class procrastinator: It took him 22 years to publish his theory, and he only did it when a competitor, Alfred Russel Wallace, came up with the identical idea.

To me, the explanation for these eccentricities seems clear. A gentle and nonconfrontational if unshakable soul, Darwin was paying a personal price for following the dictates of scientific principles to their logical end. When he began his career as a naturalist, he was a believer — originally he wanted to become a country vicar — but he followed his formidable intellect wherever it led, and it caused him to become the instrument that would overturn the hallowed dogma of Western religion.

Darwin suffered so we could...stop research on stem cells and continue to believe in god and the Easter Bunny, sans evidence that either exists? The truly tragic epilogue is how far we haven't come.