Historical note on the untimely passing of George Ralph Mines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
George Ralph Mines passed away at the age of 28. He was found unresponsive in his lab on the evening of 7 November 1914, and died in hospital later that very night, leaving behind his wife, two young children, and a third child in utero. A newspaper article published immediately following his death attributed his demise to ‘a series of experiments on respiration Saturday afternoon, using himself as a subject’ (Anon, 1914). The inscription on Mines's gravestone in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal states ‘Died suddenly as the result of a laboratory experiment.’ In a 1983 Scientific American article (Winfree, 1983), Winfree attributed Mines's death to the self-induction of fibrillation, extending the experiments he had carried out in rabbits, ‘When Mines decided it was time to begin work with human beings, he chose the most readily available experimental subject: himself.’ This account of death due to self-experimentation has been repeated in several other places (DeSilva, 1997; Altman, 1998; Acierno & Worrell, 2001). That evening I was rung up by the night watchman from the physiology department to come at once. There had been an accident. I went and found a group of medical men surrounding a supine Mines, unconscious but breathing stertorously. He had been found joined up with a pump, which appeared to blow morphia into a vein. (As a matter of fact, the apparatus was so wrongly set up that it would blow air into the circulatory system, and this it had done.) His skin around the chest was bloated with air. There was a letter for me from Mines, which apologized for the trouble he was causing us. [This letter has never been found.] Clearly he had tried to commit suicide by blowing morphia into his system, and so far had failed. This account is consistent with the autopsy report that is also in the McGill archives. Although the documentation does not provide a motive for suicide, we believe suicide is the most plausible hypothesis for Mines's death. We thank the Osler librarians Christopher Lyons and Anna Dysert for assistance. None declared. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work. All persons designated as authors qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify for authorship are listed. None declared.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".