The article Vanishing Knowledge written by David Ehrenfeld is a very effective piece. Through the six paragraphs I have chosen on pages 16 – 17, Ehrenfeld discusses the fact that although, in today’s society, we are rapidly growing with technology and coming up with new discoveries for the future, we are also forgetting valuable knowledge from the past. Within the six paragraphs, Ehrenfeld talks about his “fear for us” because the puzzles and wonders of the world are rapidly disappearing from our grasp (Ehrenfeld 17). He continues to give examples on how knowledge is vanishing from his own personal experiences with students. For example, a student had asked to him about hemoglobin, and he did not know the answer to this. This lead him to
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This book was the answer to his student’s question about hemoglobin. According to David Ehrenfeld, “Much of the information my former student had wanted was in there…I called the publisher and was told that the book had gone out of print in 1980” (16). This brings up the curiosity to why a book – “Comparative Biochemistry” – filled with such endless information would all of the sudden disappear and exist in a single man’s basement. In addition, when comparative biochemistry is brought up to older professors, they all laugh to tell him that no one focuses on that topic anymore; even better, the students studying biochemistry had no clue that particular subject ever existed (Ehrenfeld …show more content…
Knowledge is slipping through our hands like sand. We may know how to make touch screens, 4-D animations, future flying cars, and how to make surgery less messy, but do we know how the pyramids in Egypt were built? Or how massive temples that could have been built before Christ is still standing? Who figured out how to get a done on top of a cathedral with the technology we have today? Most of these questions cannot be answered, because someone simply became disinterested and did not want to pass down the information. Now people of today, see it as a wonder of the world. It is frustrating to see so many topics disappear from the world one by one, and most people are willing to let it go simply because it’s no longer “popular”. One day the world will need this information for the sake of protecting human kind, and that is the day that information will no longer be in our
This book was the answer to his student’s question about hemoglobin. According to David Ehrenfeld, “Much of the information my former student had wanted was in there…I called the publisher and was told that the book had gone out of print in 1980” (16). This brings up the curiosity to why a book – “Comparative Biochemistry” – filled with such endless information would all of the sudden disappear and exist in a single man’s basement. In addition, when comparative biochemistry is brought up to older professors, they all laugh to tell him that no one focuses on that topic anymore; even better, the students studying biochemistry had no clue that particular subject ever existed (Ehrenfeld …show more content…
Knowledge is slipping through our hands like sand. We may know how to make touch screens, 4-D animations, future flying cars, and how to make surgery less messy, but do we know how the pyramids in Egypt were built? Or how massive temples that could have been built before Christ is still standing? Who figured out how to get a done on top of a cathedral with the technology we have today? Most of these questions cannot be answered, because someone simply became disinterested and did not want to pass down the information. Now people of today, see it as a wonder of the world. It is frustrating to see so many topics disappear from the world one by one, and most people are willing to let it go simply because it’s no longer “popular”. One day the world will need this information for the sake of protecting human kind, and that is the day that information will no longer be in our